Hens Dancing

by Raffaella Barker

The Hallidays arrive bearing armfuls of exotica. A black hellebore, a jar of lobster bisque, confit de canard, organic sun-ripened-on-the-vine tomatoes and the books that the children have been longing for but which I have been too mean to buy. We are all wildly overexcited at seeing one another and I realise just how feeble my twig displays are when Rose produces a peerless posy of gold-lace polyanthus. Immediately consume half a walnut cake and three pots of tea with Rose. Due to my excitement at seeing her, my brain cannot register the fact that she does not want milk in her tea. The table becomes covered with unwanted cups of pale tea as I solicitously pour yet more milk for Rose. Meanwhile, Master Halliday, who is one and a half, is conducting a top-secret excavation in the food cupboard. He emerges, beaming, at his mother’s side and she and I scream. He is smothered in blood. Mercifully we see the bottle in his hands.

  ‘Oh, God, it’s cochineal,’ says Rose, then she blanches. ‘Look at the floor.’

  The beautiful, warm, expensive, sweet-chestnut floor is splashed with crimson. He seems to have toured every corner and we have not noticed. I laugh like an idiot; Rose leaps into action, dons rubber gloves, finds a scrubbing brush and some detergent and becomes immersed in pink foam. The next half-hour is a scene from a Carry On horror film. Rose and I scrub, wipe, sigh with relief and sit down, only to jump up shrieking again as more bloody blobs appear. Cochineal is on our shoes, under our nails, over the table and most of all on Master Halliday, now known as Vampire Baby. Rose is far more concerned about the floor, but I want to see if we can turn him back into the perfect specimen he was, or if he is going to stay gruesomely pink for ever. An hour later he is slumbering sweetly, and, thank God, not pinkly, and Rose and I collapse onto the drawing-room sofa as wrung out as a couple of old dishcloths. We are now supposed to sparkle, pre-dinner, and be vivacious. A drink is called for. And another.

  March 10th

  The evenings are slowly becoming lighter, but the air still breathes a chill through the yard when I go out to lock up the hens. The wind is high tonight, pulling at branches and wrapping around the roof, but it is mild, and, on ground level, quite still, so I decide to take the rotund terrier Rags down the lane a few yards to stretch her legs before bed. Moonlight illuminates the way, then is eclipsed by gusting cloud. I kick at an old black bag, a darker shadow in a dark corner by the hedge, and scream as it rises and lurches past me. Rags comes to the rescue with a flourish, yapping and growling at the swaying, ink-dark form. Cloud blows off the moon, and in the half-light I make out the bony shape of a calf’s back humping away down towards the road. Two others hurtle past me to join their leader. Heart still racing, I return home to telephone the farmer. Should really herd them in myself, as I know where they belong, but it is nine-thirty, and I will miss vital classic serial on the radio if I do. It is War and Peace, in twenty parts. Blissful and agonising, and essential as bathtime entertainment for me, being a million miles from childcare and domestic toil.

  March 14th

  The Women’s Institute market supplies instant satisfaction in the form of trays of gaudy primulas for me to dot around the house and plant in the garden. Much needed, as we have reached the most squalid phase of the year now, when weeds are revving up to choke the borders and no plants have yet emerged from beneath the ground. The house is just as bad, filth exposed by the harsh glare of March sunshine. Fingerprints like a tide along every door, and most furniture creaking and shedding infinitesimal quantities of sawdust every day, like a tree’s deciduum at dusk. Only notice this when hoovering, as one sweep beneath a chair leaves a very obvious path between kerbs of dust. Must don a mob cap and do some work avoidance. Spurred on to housework by the arrival of three different brochures in need of copy. My job is to write it. This week I must sift sense from pages of computer-speak to make an interesting and readable booklet for Belhaven Conference Halls, for Tremendous, a new outsized clothing catalogue, and for Heavenly Petting’s new mail-order funeral service. Can hardly contain my excitement and yearn to get down to it. But first, the cupboard under the sink has become a hotel for slugs and snails. It needs my attention.

  March 16th

  The Beauty and I are in west London preparing for a meeting with an intimidating and groovy magazine editor. As I try to wipe traces of The Beauty’s breakfast off my only decent shirt, I rack my brains for things I can say I want to write about. A human biology poster on my host’s bathroom wall offers inspiration, and I plan an article: ‘We are all obsessed with the value of our houses, but do we realise how much our internal organs are worth?’ It could be illustrated with a picture of Kate Moss with arrows and prices pointing to different valuable bits of her insides. Downstairs, the house we are staying in, which belongs to my friend Lila, is enveloped in incense and weird fluting and groaning noises are issuing from the CD player, creating an ambient atmosphere for her private yoga class. I tiptoe down and out with The Beauty, and catch a glimpse of Alaric, the hirsute Californian teacher, hitching up his Y-fronts so the waistband shows above that of his trousers as he prepares himself for a new position.

  The Beauty enjoys the magazine meeting very much, and destroys three copies of the latest issue while grinding her teeth and cackling. The editor disarms me by being friendly and approachable where I expected hauteur and disdain, and by being dressed in a delicious skippy skirt which I covet. I am delighted with the whole occasion and sweep out feeling it has all gone superbly, until I catch sight of myself in a mirror as I pass a beauty salon. My cheeks are puce, as if I have been drinking port since crack of dawn, or have reached the hot flush stage of life.

  Can’t help contrasting my appearance with The Beauty’s majestic loveliness today. She is stuffed, for the last time, because it really is too small, into an emerald-green Indian dress with mirrored and embroidered bodice. Setting off the outfit is a small mauve horse she has pinched from Lila’s spoilt daughter Calypso. She has not let go of this horse since breakfast, believing that possession is nine-tenths of the law, and this is now her horse. I am on her side. I shouldn’t think Calypso will notice, but if she did, she would not dream of giving one of her sackloads of toys to The Beauty or anyone else.

  On the way home we strike a blow for helpless femininity in the multi-storey car park. No amount of jerking forwards and backwards on my part can extract my car from its space. The iceberg-dark walls begin to close in and panic also, and I imagine spending the night in this morgue with only a few rice cakes as sustenance. Salvation appears, in a dark suit with a mobile phone and briefcase. He has just parked his own sleek car without any trouble. I rush to accost him before he vanishes onto the street.

  ‘I can’t get my car out of this car park. Please can you do it?’ I beg, and he beams happily, as men do when faced with female frailty, and obliges. I am profoundly relieved that he is not a New Man, and head for Norfolk in a cheerful and grateful frame of mind.

  March 20th

  Nits have staged a comeback. A posse is installed on Giles’s head, smaller ones grouped behind the ears, grading up to the crown of his head where the field-marshal nits, creatures on the scale of an insect Arnold Schwarzenegger, have settled. Felix has them too, and as usual I start scratching as soon as I spy theirs.

  I am an old hand at nit work, and am expert on different methods. The doctor used to give us highly toxic lotion which a) didn’t work, and b) has since been condemned as brain-damaging. We keep away from orthodox cures now and have adopted a series of treatments through discussion with other infestees. Tea tree shampoo and conditioner is the current success story, combined with vigorous use of a nit comb, although here opinion is divided. My mother, despite insisting that my brother Desmond and I have never had nits, swears by the plastic comb, while Lila snorts in disbelief at the idea and waves her metal-toothed one as if it is a magic wand. We use both, and it is gratifying in the same awful way that picking spots is gratifying, to see the nits lying helpless on the comb and then to guillotine them with a sharp fingernail.

  I forget to d
e-nit myself and remember on the way to the hairdresser. Arrive there in a welter of embarrassment at what they may find. Mercifully Emily, my usual coiffeuse, is in a trance of gloom and stares at the ceiling without speaking once during her twenty-minute assault on my hair. This technique does not make me looked groomed and expensive, but at least it saves me the hideous humiliation of being outed as a nit carrier.

  March 29th

  Easter Sunday, and we have lunch with my mother. Roast lamb, mint sauce, apple crumble. This has been Easter lunch ever since I can remember, and is the high point of my mother’s culinary calendar. We find her painting her fingernails alternate red and blue stripes.

  ‘It won’t be ready for a bit,’ she says, ‘probably an hour. Go and see what you can find in the garden.’

  She has a large carrier bag behind her back, and as we follow the children outside, she surreptitiously reaches into it, replenishing stocks of miniature coloured eggs on garden seats and steps. ‘Come back, you’ve missed some,’ she calls to Giles, now vanishing into undergrowth at the bottom of the garden. Then she turns to me.

  ‘I’ve hidden a few miniatures and a couple of packets of Silk Cut as well. Just to make it fun for us geriatrics and The Gnome. Come on, let’s go and find them, it’s time for a pre-lunch drink.’

  The Gnome, my mother’s lodger, emerges from his caravan, called from his star maps and astrological calculations by whoops of triumph from outside. He is particularly Hobbit-esque today, with ink smudges on his face and a short brown suede jacket with brass buttons and a belt. All he lacks is a pointy hat. Felix crawls out from under the caravan step and charges towards the Gnome’s front door.

  ‘Oh, no, dear child.’ The Gnome is so softly spoken that his voice has been recorded and used to signify conscience and also dew, on local radio productions. I can never believe that anyone can hear him, but somehow they do. The Gnome smiles, bestowing watery good tidings on the boys.

  ‘Don’t go in there, it’s just a mess. Here, the Easter Rabbit asked me to pass these on.’

  He holds out two toffee apples with long brown felt ears. Felix and Giles thank him and vanish behind the caravan. My mother beckons to him.

  ‘Come in for a drink, or rather out. I’ve put a table down by the stream.’

  The Gnome looks pleased, and follows us down a winding path to the tiny fairy stream, where my mother has arranged three small chairs and a table. Water chatters over blue and brown pebbles in the one-foot-wide ripple of river as it makes its way through the garden. A pink jug and bowl lie on the bank, and a small pair of pink wellington boots. My mother sinks into one of the chairs and lights a cigarette.

  ‘It’s really for The Beauty, but we may as well sit here for a minute with her and see how many of those miniatures we can spot. They’ve got ready-made Bloody Marys in them.’

  The Beauty, like an empress, sits by the water’s edge, chewing chocolate and wiggling her boot-clad feet. We, her subjects, drink Bloody Marys straight from little cold bottles, and absorb spring birdsong in the pale sunshine.

  April 1st

  Suspicions should have been aroused by the arrival of Giles and Felix by my bedside.

  ‘Hello, Mummy, we’ve made you some tea.’

  Dear little tousled children with pyjamas on. Kiss them as I struggle into wakefulness, and do not even mind that it is six-thirty and still dark, thanks to British Summer Time, because I am touched by their kindness. Nestle against pillows with darling sons on either side. Both very smiley. Sweet. Sip daintily at my tea.

  ‘Euugh! Who on earth taught you to make tea? This has got salt in it, you twits.’

  ‘Ha, ha, April Fool.’ They dance around my bedroom squealing and laughing. ‘Tricked you, tricked you. We wanted to make an apple-pie bed, but there weren’t any apples.’

  Become helpless laughing myself, and with their Exocet instincts for a weak moment they wring a promise of apple-pie-bed instruction from me.

  ‘Then we can do it to Daddy, next time we go to stay.’ An excellent notion.

  April 8th

  Vivienne and Simon, local farmers and stalwart friends, arrive for tea with three pigeons, a pair of ducks and a mother hen with chicks.

  ‘Happy Easter,’ beams Simon, kissing my cheeks on the threshold, leaning in through the back door and swinging a pigeon from each hand.

  Giles has been up a tree overseeing the nest-building activities of various small birds. He slithers down, having spotted the pigeons, and helps Simon mend the holes in the wire netting of the henhouse.

  ‘They can all live together in there,’ pronounces Simon, ‘but we’ll have to get rid of some of those young cocks. You’ve got more than you have hens, you know.’

  ‘Venetia, don’t let him bully you. He loves killing things, and will find any excuse,’ Vivienne intervenes, as Simon marches towards the henhouse with a broom in his hands.

  ‘I’ll leave it until dusk, then they’ll be in the house. It’s easier when they’re asleep.’

  I am unkeen on this cold-blooded murder. ‘Can’t I just give them away?’ I plead.

  ‘Don’t be feeble,’ says Simon briskly. ‘No one wants cockerels except to eat, so you may as well eat them yourself.’

  Fortunately, the execution is forgotten in a sudden flurry of activity. A car’s wheel bowls into the yard, hotly pursued by my mother’s car.

  ‘Does she not know where the spare tyre lives?’ jokes Simon. It transpires that the wheel has fallen off the car.

  ‘It happened just by your gate. Thank God. I could have been on the superhighway.’ My mother clambers out of her seat and stands in the yard, huddled around a comforting cigarette.

  ‘She means the main road,’ Felix whispers to Vivienne.

  My mother continues, ‘It just kept rolling, and I thought it was better to stay with the wheel than to stop. Odd that the car didn’t tip up. I was rather impressed by it. I suppose they balance them in case of this sort of thing.’

  ‘I don’t think car manufacturers expect the wheels to fall off their vehicles,’ says Simon drily, his voice wafting from beneath the car, where he is examining the axle.

  April 17th

  The financial struggle is exacerbated by the non-arrival of Charles’s usual cheque. When I telephone him, he says that he forgot to post it this week because he and Helena were skiing. However, he will send it now. Then he coughs and says, ‘And maybe to help finances, you might have Helena’s aunt to stay tomorrow night. She’s bringing her bloodhounds to Norfolk for some filming. The film company will pay you.’

  Even though they are related to Helena, I cannot resist the idea of film-star bloodhounds and agree to have them. When I put the telephone down I am irritated to realise that I accidentally let the skiing holiday through without comment.

  April 18th

  The bloodhounds arrive with Val, aunt of the poison dwarf Helena. They leap, with sinewy grace, from a brand-new Range Rover, at precisely the moment that Rags returns from her excavation of the rubbish bags at the bottom of the drive. She launches herself at the nearest one, her absurd, clockwork yaps ricocheting off the door panel. The bloodhounds retreat in horror, but the larger one is too slow: Rags leaps and embeds her teeth in its voluminous and probably very valuable lower lip. It yowls and runs to its car for comfort with Rags dangling from the mighty jaw. Luckily Val thinks it’s funny, otherwise we could be facing a vast bill for trauma and surgery to the film star.

  Felix and Giles throw sticks for the bloodhounds and Rags dashes to and fro yapping, determined not to be left out. Val comes to life wondrously at the offer of a gin and tonic and I pump her for Hello!-style information about the famous people she has met. She can only remember films by the animals and doesn’t know who anyone is.

  ‘Oh, yes, they used Jane Bentley’s horses for Sense and Sensibility, and three of my pugs. Chris Dowell was the lucky one on that – two hundred white doves she took down there and they never got them out of their cages. She got paid two grand just f
or being there.’

  ‘But did you meet Alan Rickman?’

  ‘Who? Oh, you mean the bloke with the black-saddle horse. No… he didn’t look much once he got off the horse. I’d be hard put recognising him, to be honest.’

  There is evidently no point in pursuing this line with her, so I try a different tack.

  ‘Could Rags do film work?’ Val laughs more than I feel is necessary at this, and I am hugely relieved when she asks if there is a local pub she can eat in. I offer to babysit for the bloodhounds and am accepted. Wonder if I can charge extra for this service.

  April 21st

  Garden work is badly needed right now, or the whole thing will bolt and be gone for the summer. I do wish I had not sown so many seeds. The conservatory is littered with trays: they are in the cold frame and perched in the back kitchen where Sidney, the cat, instead of using them as a litter tray as one might expect, sleeps in them, crushing the struggling seedlings straight back into the dirt from whence they came. I must plant them to save them from suffocation by cat.

  I array myself in an anorak caked with plaster and dog hair and an orange bobble hat and step gingerly out into the elements. I do not look fetching and have picked a bad day for gardening; dirty grey clouds spit rain in flurries and the bullish wind pushes me around. I would give up, but my mother has taken The Beauty for the day, and I must seize this opportunity to have uninterrupted access to soil, compost, rose thorns and other items unacceptable to a baby. I am sidetracked, as I wheel numerous seed trays towards the borders, by my short red wellingtons. They are on my feet, but I keep glimpsing them out of the corner of my eye, and they make me uneasy. I am pretty sure that they look absurd, and even foul. Still, no one can see me, so it doesn’t matter and I won’t wear them again. I plant a row of black pansies and the sun rushes out from behind a cloud, the wind drops and a waft of spring warmth envelops me. Spreading my arms wide, I throw myself on the grass and gaze up at the infinite blue.