Kindergarten

by Peter Rushforth

  He nodded at Jo and, bent over the cello, began to play the long piece of wordless music before the song began. At the exact moment he moved into a higher key, Jo began to sing:

  “Von fern die Uhren schlagen,

  Es ist schon tiefe Nacht,

  Die Lampe brennt so düster,

  Dein Bettlein ist gemacht.

  Die Winde nur noch gehen

  Wehklagend um das Haus.

  Wir sitzen einsam drinnen

  Und lauschen oft hinaus.

  Es ist, als müsstest leise

  Du klopfen an die Tür …”

  The illustration of the empty cradle was on the wall opposite them.

  When he had finished playing, Corrie held his position for a moment, and then relaxed, leaning back and looking across at Lilli. She was gazing across at the painting, holding tightly on to Matthias as he sat on her knee, lying against her. She said nothing for some time, and then looked at him.

  “You wrote that music, Corrie, didn’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “I have never heard that poem as a song before, but your music made it into a beautiful one. Thank you.”

  After they had listened to some poetry, and Matthias had sung a song he had heard on the radio, the same line over and over again, Jo played a gavotte on his flute, composed for him by Corrie, as Matthias did one of his dances, jigging from foot to foot, and turning round and round. The last candle finally went out as Corrie was playing his cello. They listened in the darkness, in the firelight, until he had finished, and then the lights were put on and the presents opened.

  CORRIE had just finished drying the last plate when Jo, who had finished his share of the washing-up a short while before him, reappeared in the kitchen.

  “Come and listen!” he whispered, signalling to Corrie like a very small boy expressing urgency in an old black-and-white film.

  Corrie moved out into Lilli’s hall, closing the kitchen door behind him, moving very quietly, caught by Jo’s mood. He sat down on the bottom stair, beside Jo, his feet next to some of Matthias’s scattered toys. There was a little woolly bear that he remembered Mum buying him in Bamburgh when he was seven. He picked it up and dangled it by one of its paws.

  From upstairs they could hear Lilli telling Matthias the story of “The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.” Matthias had come down, washed and dressed for bed, when they were in the middle of doing the dishes, to kiss them both good night. Jo sat with his knees pulled up against his chest, and his head leaning on its side on top of them, listening very intently.

  “‘The seven little kids cried, “You must show us your paws first before you can come in, so that we will know that you really are our dear kind mother.” So the wolf put his flour-covered paws in through the window, and when the little kids saw that they were white, they believed that he really was their mother, and they opened the door. And in came the wolf! They were terrified, and…’”

  Lilli sounded quite anxious. She always read stories well.

  They listened a little longer.

  “Corrie, do you remember when Mum used to read me that story?”

  Jo’s face was turned away from Corrie, and he could not see his expression.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “That time when I had asthma really badly.”

  “‘In tears,’” Lilli was saying upstairs,” ‘the mother goat called out the name of her youngest child, and a little voice said, “Mother, dear mother, I am hiding in the clockcase.’”

  Jo pushed at the bear that Corrie was holding by its front paws, until it rocked backwards and forwards.

  “When we were in the dining-room, before we opened the presents …” Jo, began. “When we were there, performing for Lilli, it reminded me of the Victorian Evening.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was the last time we saw Mum, and we didn’t realise.”

  Jo’s hair was tousled from where it had rubbed against his knees.

  On the Sunday night before Mum had flown to Rome, they had put on a Victorian Evening for Lilli, who was still suffering the after-effects of her stroke. Dad had driven Mum to the airport early the following morning, when he and Jo were still in bed.

  Then, unexpectedly, Jo smiled.

  “I’ll always remember that evening.”

  Jo had drawn a programme for Lilli in a variety of elaborate Victorian type styles, and they furnished the window-bay of Lilli’s dining-room like the corner of a Victorian drawing-room, carrying through the scrapscreen from their living-room, moving the chaise-longue round, and putting Jo’s model theatre on a small tripod table and Cyril—deputising for an aspidistra—on a jardiniére from the sun lounge. Wearing Victorian clothes, they performed for an hour, with Lilli as their only audience. They acted part of Lady Audley’s Secret, with Jo, who rapidly assumed a woman’s costume, a memorable Alicia. Mum was Lady Audley. They read the death of Little Nell; extracts from a handbook of Victorian etiquette; “Casabianca,” “Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine,” among other poems—and sang several Victorian songs. The one Corrie remembered best was Mum and Jo singing “Won’t You Buy My Pretty Flowers?”

  Upstairs, Lilli was reaching the end of the story.

  “‘… the heavy stones made the wolf fall into the well, and he was drowned. When the seven little kids saw what had happened, they came running up to the well and shouted for joy, “The wicked wolf is dead! The wicked wolf is dead!” They danced around the well with their mother.’”

  Jo pushed at the bear again, and it fell to the floor.

  He was bending down to pick it up when the doorbell was rung, three times, in a signal they recognised.

  “Sal.”

  Sal had been Mum’s closest friend, and was a regular caller at both houses.

  When Corrie opened the door, she staggered in, struggling with her umbrella and several parcels, as if she had been given a violent push in the back. She groaned, leaning back against the door, straining to close it.

  “What a night!”

  She dumped the parcels into Corrie’s arms, and bent down to kiss him on the cheek. He was still only five feet, three and one-half inches tall.

  “Happy Christmas, gorgeous.”

  She ran her hands through the tight curls of her newly permed hair, shaking out the wetness, and brushed at the front of her clothing. Then she peered closely at Corrie’s hair, assuming a scowl. She claimed to be deeply resentful of Corrie’s dark curly hair, a style she could only achieve by visits to the hairdresser’s.

  “You’re not really letting poor little Jo sing out on the Green in this weather, are you, you rotten swine?”

  “Did you call my name, belovèd?” asked Jo, standing up and striking a dramatic pose.

  “Can it be he?” Sal said, clutching her hands to her heart as she turned to face him.

  “My own!” he called. “I yearn to be with you! Clasp me to your bosom! Madden me with desire!”

  Jo dived into Sal’s arms, and she hoisted him up into the air, his feet dangling, and pressed him against her.

  “My angel!”

  It was a performance they went through regularly, once in the middle of Norwich market-place when they had seen Sal there. A stall-holder had offered Jo a cauliflower to swap places with him.

  “Can we tone down these scenes of unbridled passion?” Corrie asked.

  “Heavens, we’re observed!” said Jo, his voice rather muffled.

  Lilli was coming down the stairs.

  “I like that new pendant you’ve got round your neck,” she said to Sal. It was the first time she had joined in one of their silly sessions.

  Sal started laughing, and dropped Jo.

  “He’s too heavy to wear for long,” Sal said. “You’ve been feeding him up again.”

  “We’ve left you a few scraps,” Corrie said. “Mind that lump in the carpet.”

  Sal stepped over Jo, and took Corrie’s arm as they went through into the dining-room.

  “DO YOU ha
ppen to have the time on you?” Corrie asked later, as they walked through Lilli’s kitchen towards the sun lounge. He had been asking Jo the time every quarter of an hour or so since Jo had unwrapped his present. Corrie had given him a combined Christmas and birthday present, an expensive gift that he had been saving up for for some time: a Snoopy wrist-watch, with the dog’s front legs as the hands of the watch. Clutching a tennis-racket in one hand, Snoopy lugubriously swung his arms round and round the dial.

  Exaggeratedly, Jo pulled back the cuff of his shirt and moved the wrist with the watch on up towards his face, twisting his wrist from side to side so that the watch faced towards him, then away.

  “The time by my brand-new Snoopy watch is eight-ohseven precisely.”

  “I say, what a spiffing watch! “

  Corrie and Jo often spoke in the slang of old-fashioned school stories, assuming a painfully genteel and high-pitched accent, parodying their fictional roles.

  “Santa brought it for me. I can tell the time now!”

  “How super!”

  The lights were on again on their side of the sun lounge, and in the kitchen. Baskerville was lying in his basket beside the desk with an expression of utter abandonment and desolation on his face. He lumbered to his feet as they came in, looking guardedly pleased.

  Jo waved the parcel he had brought through from Lilli’s, and began to circle around Baskerville.

  “I’ve got a prezzy for you!”

  Corrie heard them chasing each other about the sun lounge as he went through into the kitchen, and then into the living-room, leaving the light off. He looked out through the front window towards the tree in the centre of the Green. No one was there yet.

  There were bangs and slitherings from the back of the house, and Baskerville barked a couple of times. Corrie sat in the dark for a short time, and then went back through into the sun lounge. Baskerville was stretched out on the floor, chewing an enormous bone.

  “I got him so excited that he wet himself,” Jo said, wiping at the tiles with a mop. “I’ve never had that effect on anyone before.”

  Baskerville, grasping the bone on its end between his two front paws, shifted his position slightly, and the bone fell forward and hit him sharply on the nose. He looked startled, and scrabbled backwards.

  “Baskervilles don’t like bones.”

  Jo put the mop and bucket back in the corner, and then walked towards Corrie. He raised his eyebrows, pulling the corners of his mouth down in an expression of innocence. He had an extraordinarily mobile face, his features always shifting. When he talked, every particle of him took part in the performance. He could make Corrie giggle very easily sometimes, by just looking at him.

  “I have my theories about you and Sal,” he said. “The whole thing became clear to me when you sneaked away into the dining-room together, leaving me lying on the floor.”

  “And I thought we were being so discreet.”

  “It’s obvious. She’s studying you to use in her next novel. In the interests of research, writers are sometimes compelled to undergo some very unpleasant experiences.”

  “Do you think that my perversions…”

  “Many and varied though they are…”

  “…are advanced enough to interest her?”

  Sal was quite well known as a writer of novels for young people—“New Adults,” they were called by the publisher—usually dealing frankly with complex emotional or sexual difficulties.

  “You could work on them a bit,” Jo said. “Show a bit of imagination.” He looked at Baskerville. “Why not have a passionate affair with Baskerville? I don’t think she’s used that one yet.”

  Baskerville, looking vaguely troubled, edged away and eyed Corrie with deep suspicion.

  “He doesn’t look too keen on the idea.”

  “Poor old Baskerville. The dignified butt of vulgar jesting.”

  Jo began to stroke Baskerville’s head, and then continued speaking. “She is good, though, isn’t she?” he asked. “Her novels.”

  “Stephen’s Child is.”

  “Not as good as Small for His Age.”

  “Just because it’s about you.”

  “Judging by the title. Actually”—Jo’s voice became excruciatingly cultured—“I warmed to the subtle nuances of the adverbial clauses…”

  “Well-educated infant!”

  “…reminiscent, one feels, of the later period of Henry James.”

  “One does indeed. One also thrills to the shimmering evocativeness of the setting.”

  “And the daring audacity of the semicolons.”

  “And the enormous bosoms.”

  “And the enormous bosoms.” Jo giggled. “If it did have those, it might explain why people are so, rude about Sal’s books.”

  “Never a week goes by without some headmaster having heart failure.”

  “This book…This book…”—Jo began to keel over in slow motion, an expression of apoplectic horror on his face—“contains scenes of…masturbation!”

  “Whatever that might be.”

  “Whatever that might be.”

  Corrie looked at his watch. “The carol service will be starting soon.”

  Jo searched for his wellington boots under the table.

  “I expect we’ll be the only people there. When they tell you that you’re singing a solo”—his voice became suddenly effete—“one does tend to imagine that one’s not completely solo, and that there will be people there to listen to one.”

  “One does.”

  “I’m the vicar in the empty church.”

  “Verily.”

  Jo stood up and put the wellington boots on.

  “I’m going to sing whether anyone’s there or not.”

  He looked at the wooden weather-house on the dresser. Both figures, the man and the woman, were inside the house, their backs turned on the outside world.

  “I know just how you feel,” he said.

  The telephone began to ring in the hall.

  “I bet I know what that’s about,” Jo said, and went out.

  He came back in a few minutes later, nodding his head.

  “Cancelled? “

  “Cancelled. I’ll just go and tell Lillie”

  When he came back in, Jo pulled on his anorak and took down Dad’s umbrella.

  “I said I was going to sing whether anyone was there or not.”

  Corrie made a move towards the hallway, to go out to the Green from the front door, but Jo went through the sun lounge and opened the door into the garden at the back.

  “Come on,” he said to Corrie. “Quick, before Baskerville makes a break for it.”

  Corrie had to bend down, sharing the umbrella with his brother, bumping into him, standing on his heels, until he took it from him and held it over both of them. Jo led him out on to the path which ran alongside the end of the garden, along the top of the low cliff above the beach. He turned left towards Gun Hill, and some time later, wet and breathless, they were walking into St. Edmund’s churchyard.

  He followed Jo, to stand in front of Mum’s grave.

  Jo took a torch out of his anorak pocket, and they looked at the writing on the gravestone.

  There was a bunch of copper-coloured chrysanthemums on the grave, their petals separated and scattered about.

  “They didn’t last long in the rain,” Jo said.

  Then, just as he had done in Lilli’s dining-room, he began to sing, naturally and unself-consciously, his head back, his hands thrust into his anorak pockets, his voice perfectly distinct above the sound of the rain on the umbrella.

  “In the bleak mid-winter

  Frosty wind made moan;

  Earth stood hard as iron,

  Water like a stone;

  Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

  Snow on snow,

  In the bleak mid-winter,

  Long ago…”

  As Jo sang, Corrie felt again the mood he had entered looking at the Wind in the Willows calendar in the kitchen,
and hearing the words of the nativity at Lilli’s: the sense of time passing, of things slipping away. It was the dying fall of “Long ago.”

  While Jo was singing at Lilli’s, Corrie had thought of Mum’s funeral service, of sitting there with his whole attention concentrated on the daffodils in the vase on the table at the front of the church, shutting out everything else around him, thinking of Rousseau, falling waters, unpopulated greenness.

  He was known to be a polite boy, respectful, well-mannered, shy. When people smiled at him, he smiled back, as though he were happy.

  “He seems to be taking his mother’s death very well,” they said. “He’s been so mature about the whole thing. Wonderful with Jo and Matthias.”

  How easily people can be fooled, he thought, not with pleasure, aware of depths within himself, little doors deep inside his head, doors that should never be opened.

  Only Dad had seen him crying.

  One night, two weeks after the funeral, he wanted to cry. He couldn’t stop himself any longer. It was late at night, and he was scared that Jo—in the adjoining room—might hear him. He knelt down in the bathroom, with the light off, his head pressed down on the edge of the bath. Cool air rose from the plug-hole. The smell of Pears’ soap. He watched a tear run down the side of the bath, like following raindrops down a window-pane, the rug pressing into his knees through his thin pyjamas, and then had to leave the bathroom because he was making a noise and Jo was just along the corridor.

  He went downstairs, looking for somewhere to cry. Dad found him in the pantry, sitting on the bottom shelf beside the bread-bin, his feet resting on the potatoes in the vegetable rack, bent over, crying into a tea-towel smelling of lemon-juice.

  Dad stood in the doorway, in his dressing-gown, looked at him for a moment, came inside, and they remained with their arms around each other for a long time in the darkness. He never said a word the whole time, and never said anything about it afterwards.

  Dad hadn’t been fooled.

  Corrie had always felt that he would have been friends with his Mum and Dad even if they hadn’t been related. Sometimes he called them by their first names, Pieter and Margaret. They had both been twenty-one when he was born. They were always ready to discuss his theories with him, and always said “Thank you” if he did something for them. When he was small—smaller—Dad used to give him rides on his shoulder, and in the weeks after Mum’s funeral they seemed to go back to those times they had together. Dad wrestled with him, lifted him up, threw him into the air. It was a bit embarrassing at his age, but it was nice. Dad gave him little jobs to do, and sat with him, talking, side by side, as he painted, did the garden, or sorted out the files in the office. One week they changed round all the furniture in the house, and Dad let him choose the new colours to repaint the downstairs rooms. He took them all out in the car every week, and they would talk about everything they’d seen. He left him alone when he wanted to be alone. Dad had talked with him about how much he missed Mum. When they were in London—the time they had gone to see Lilli—Dad had taken him and Jo to the National Gallery one morning, and pointed out to them the place where he and Mum had first met, in front of “A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal.” Corrie still smiled inwardly to himself whenever he saw a reproduction of this painting.