Temples of Delight

by Barbara Trapido

  Unlike Roland, David found the art of living rather complicated. But, as far as Alice could see, this had very little to do with his voting habits.

  ‘M-my grandma always votes Labour,’ she said. ‘She thinks my father’s a t-t-traitor because he votes Conservative. But her milk bottles alw-ways sh-shine like crystal.’ Roland laughed good-humouredly. It seemed to him automatically amusing that his Alice should have a northern grandmother. He kissed her and patronized her with his genial and relentless loyalty.

  ‘If she’s your “grandma”, my poppet,’ he said, ‘then I’m absolutely sure she’s as charming and decent a little body as ever walked the earth. Anyway, everyone votes Labour up north, Alice. What else can poor Grandma do? She resides in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Chester-le-Street. It’s a one-party state up there.’

  ‘Not in Chester-le-Street,’ Alice said. ‘She lives in a mining village near Hetton-le-Hole.’ Roland laughed again, as if it made no difference. He had never been to either.

  ‘Sweetie,’ he said tenderly. ‘You get the dearest little hint of Geordie in your voice every time you say the word “grandma”.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Alice said. ‘David’s too b-busy to keep his house clean. He’s working f-for everybody’s house. He cares about everybody’s family.’ Roland raised an eyebrow. ‘ “In my Father’s house are ma-many m-mansions”,’ Alice said stoutly.

  ‘Oh, I say!’ Roland said and his laughter became more robust. ‘We’re having recourse to the Good Book now – in defence of our favourite heathen filthpacket?’ Alice had noticed before that if ever she referred to the Bible, Roland behaved as though she were somehow, endearingly, amusingly, poaching on his area of expertise. He reacted much as though she had begun to quote him batting averages.

  ‘Any word as yet on the little chum?’ he said.

  ‘Not yet,’ Alice said, because Miss Trotter had not yet answered her letter. Perhaps she never would.

  Chapter 16

  Among David Morgan’s collection of eclectic posters was one, smaller and less obtrusive than the rest, which became a particular weapon in Roland’s jovial armoury. ‘IF YOU CAN READ THIS,’ it said, ‘THANK A TEACHER’.

  ‘And if you can’t bloody read it,’ said Roland – deliberately within the hearing of Maya Morgan whom he considered a tiresomely limp, out-dated sort of flower person – ‘try sacking the teacher instead.’ He was provokingly airing his contempt for the local state junior school, the one attended by the elder two of the three little Morgan children. Admittedly, he did not know at that stage that the children could not read. And, admittedly again, Alice thought, Roland had a case. Alice, who had twice, recently, gone to collect the children from school, had observed through the classroom door that the children sat talking and jostling at tables which were arranged as if the classroom were a café. They called out and ran about during work time and made paper aeroplanes of the worksheets. It was all a very far cry from the Silent Reading Hour and it gave Alice a grudging new respect for Miss Aldridge and Great World Leaders.

  But Maya ought not to be the butt of Roland’s snipes, Alice thought. Maya was an innocuous woman, pacific and somewhat over-earnest. She wasn’t even ‘political’. She wore salmon corduroy trousers and a blouse with macramé on the boobs. She spent her time typing at a heavy old Remington in a cubby hole which must once have been the coalshed. It pained Alice to think that, had the Morgans not needed her rent money, Maya could have housed her Remington in the attic bedroom instead, and typed at the nice little desk. And, unlike David, who was entertained by Roland, Maya was so readily shockable. It seemed unfair that Roland should enjoy picking on her. She so invariably responded to him with an anxious, bruised sensitivity. But Roland thought her intolerably holier-than-thou and sallied forth uncontrite.

  ‘Education is not about the three R’s, Roland,’ Maya explained to him at once. ‘We can read, can’t we, and look at all of us. Do we stand up well under scrutiny?’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with me,’ Roland said.

  ‘The woman is an absolute bloody spineless wimp,’ Roland said to Alice in private. ‘And what does she do, neglecting her kids all day and cowering in that ghastly black hole of Calcutta? She writing her memoirs, or something?’

  Alice did not know. She didn’t terribly like to enter the cubby hole because, pinned to the wall, Maya had a blown-up, postersize photograph of herself in childbirth. It had been taken by her previous husband, and the person emerging from her alarmingly extended pubes was Iona, David’s fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. Iona, who had in common with Roland Dent that she detested and despised her mother, had drawn moustaches on the poster with a thick black marking pen – both on herself and on her mother. And she had given herself horns and a vicious looking pitchfork, which was piercing her mother’s gargantuan parts with its prongs. Iona was extraordinary, and somewhat alarming, Alice thought.

  ‘She’s writing a novel,’ Iona told Alice. ‘Only it gets longer and more fucking boring by the day.’

  ‘Have you read it?’ Alice said.

  “Course I haven’t read it,’ Iona said. ‘Fuck. Why should I, when it’s such a pile of shit?’ Iona, who was a bright and able child, was committed to the redundant rump of the local secondary school where she sat among obstructive bruisers who played football with their schoolbags during lessons. She had seemingly contrived this position through resolute under-achievement and in order to annoy her mother. She could be wildly funny about her classmates and about what the curriculum considered suitable for the ‘less able child’, particularly to Roland, who – much to her mother’s chagrin and to Alice’s surprise – got on with Iona like a house on fire.

  Iona’s mother had been abandoned by her American husband and had brought her child to England at the age of seven, an angry, destructive, bright little girl who had sunk her teeth into the flesh of her new classmates, had repeatedly flooded the junior school toilets and had frequently played truant. Now, seven years later, and with a tolerant and understanding stepfather who had even gone to the lengths of adopting her, Iona continued to play truant. She also chain-smoked, painted over the windows of her bedroom with matt-black emulsion paint, stayed out all night without picking up the phone and hung out over weekends with drunken, neo-fascist public schoolboys in black winkle-pickers.

  Iona’s dress was a curious hybrid of puff-sleeved milkmaid blouses worn with a studded biker’s jacket, filthy scarlet cheerleader’s skirt and high-heeled black suede ankle boots. These last she had swathed in metal chains and she wore them, invariably, over derelict black fishnet tights with enormous holes held together here and there with lumps of Blu-Tack. Iona dyed her hair black. She wore black lipstick and black nail varnish on the stumps of severely bitten fingernails and she always wore six earrings – three pendant human skulls modelled in lead, a crucifix and a pair of smallish meat hooks. On Saturday nights Iona sometimes crimped her hair with a sort of hand-held waffle-iron which she plugged into the wall. She would coat the hair in styling mousse before clamping it between the jaws of the waffle-iron. The effect on the hair was Tom-and-Jerry electrified zig-zag, while on the waffle-iron it was a Chinese lacquer of old hairspray and styling mousse textured with unattractive layers of caramelized hair.

  Yet Roland, unlike Alice, seemed wholly untroubled by Iona. Or was it, as Alice suspected, that Iona appeared to Roland as walking ammunition against her mother?

  ‘Spunky little thing,’ he remarked, after Iona had passed him on the stairs looking like a well-rumpled extra on the set of a Dracula movie. ‘Now come on, Alice, don’t be a prude. Weren’t you ever a “teenager”, my poppet?’ It came to Alice, with some surprise, that she still was a ‘teenager’, in fact. ‘My adorable, old-fashioned girl,’ Roland said. ‘Just because you’ve been sensibly brought-up. I’m quite sure your mother never spent her time slouching in an unreconstituted coalhole.’

  ‘No,’ Alice said, and she thought of her mother, with her intercom and her BMW and he
r opalescent fingernails. ‘No, she didn’t, I suppose.’ She hadn’t talked to him much about her parents.

  Alice, before she began to teach Thomas and Sophie Morgan to read, guardedly petitioned Roland for know-how.

  ‘How do you teach people to read?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t,’ Roland said. ‘My boys all come to me having passed the Common Entrance Examination.’

  ‘Yes, but how do you do it?’ Alice said. Roland surprised her then by casually letting drop that he had done a stint of teaching practice in a secondary school in Hackney where he had evidently taught illiterates with a high degree of success. He was not at all given to considering this achievement remarkable, nor to analysing quite how he had done it. Not until Alice so insistently began to press him.

  ‘Much the same as teaching anything else, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Nine-tenths positive thinking and twelve-tenths crowd control. You can’t teach anything if your class is hanging from the wall bars. Oh, I don’t know, Alice. Just the usual carrot and stick.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Alice said.

  ‘House points when they get it right and whack them when they shirk,’ Roland said. ‘Just above the ankle and it seldom leaves a mark.’

  ‘Are you s-saying you h-hit them?’ Alice said.

  Roland laughed. ‘Only when it was absolutely necessary,’ he said. ‘Come on, Alice. Snot-nosed rabble? No bloody discipline, you understand. Someone had to do it.’

  ‘And h-house points?’ Alice said. ‘In H-hackney?’

  ‘Speaking metaphorically, of course,’ Roland said. ‘Gold stars, silver stars, boiled sweets, any old tripe. First you invent the currency and then you ration it like blazes. Never pays to play the soup kitchen with a bunch of kids, you know. Why are you interrogating me like this?’

  ‘Well—’ Alice said. ‘I’m only asking.’ And Roland smiled, knowingly.

  ‘Do I take it that the poor little Morgan tribe can’t read?’ he said. ‘Well, well, well.’

  ‘Only Thomas and Sophie,’ Alice replied. ‘William is too young.’

  Roland kissed her. ‘Frankly, I shouldn’t bother if I were you,’ he said. ‘I mean, if the kids’ own parents don’t think them worth the price of a decent prep school.’ There were times when Roland, for all his evident humanity, was capable of utterances like this.

  ‘They don’t have any m-money,’ Alice said. ‘And they don’t believe in p-privilege. David wants the same f-for everybody’s children.’

  ‘How frightfully perverted,’ Roland said promptly. ‘You’d expect the chap would at least try and root for his own kids.’ None the less, Roland appeared next day with a set of aged Beacon Readers and a box of homemade word cards in bold lower case.

  ‘No special magic, sweetie,’ he said. ‘If you’re serious about all this. Ten minutes every day and go rather miserly on the house points. Tell me: what are these infants forbidden – or do they have carte blanche?’

  ‘White sugar and red food colouring,’ Alice said. ‘Maya doesn’t allow it in the house.’

  ‘Right,’ Roland said, with a rare dollop of malice. ‘I believe that what meets the case here is cherry-flavoured lollipops. And another thing, my poppet. Blow their noses before you begin.’

  ‘What for?’ Alice said.

  ‘Induces murderous intent,’ he said. ‘Proximity to minors wiping snot all over their shirtcuffs.’

  Alice, in the event, used Smarties and perfumed erasers and little plastic space toys which were currently endowed with prestige. She was anything but miserly with the treats and handed them out very readily. Indeed, Sophie and Thomas would do nothing until they had made a smash-and-grab raid on her treasure store. But she heard them every day and by the end of the term they could read.

  David was in his kitchen when Sophie read to him, stumblingly, from The Magic Iron Pot.

  ‘ “The-pot-said – ‘I skip, I skip – I-skip-to-the-rich-man’s-house-and-bring-back-what-ever-you-need,”” Sophie read. David was burning his fingers on a casserole at the time. The casserole, like everything David cooked, came a sort of army camouflage green. He dropped it on the floor where it lay like seaweed at low tide.

  ‘Ouch!’ he said. ‘Good God. Sophie! Are you telling me you can read?’ And he smiled with pleasure through his steamed-up lenses.

  ‘And me,’ Thomas said.

  ‘I’m better,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Shurrup bum-head,’ Thomas said. ‘We both done it the same with Alice.’

  ‘The woman is a marvel,’ David said. ‘Well done, small-fry.’ And he went to call Maya from the coalshed.

  ‘The children can read,’ he said. ‘Listen.’

  Thomas took the book and began to read. ‘ “As-soon-as-it-was-filled-it-said – ‘I skip-I skip’ – it-skipped-away-and-went-from-the-rich-wo-man’s-kitchen-to-the-poor-wo-man’s-kitchen,” ’ Thomas incanted.

  ‘A suitable tale of socialist redress,’ Roland said, just to needle Maya. She appeared not to hear him. Neither did she appear at all surprised or impressed.

  ‘Learning readiness,’ she said. She was addressing David as he shovelled his dinner from the floor. ‘Everyone finds his own pace.’

  ‘Poppycock,’ Roland said. ‘Alice has taught your kids to read, Maya. She’s been wiping their snotty little noses and sticking them in a book day after day.’

  ‘It’s true,’ David said. ‘Alice taught them.’

  Maya looked rather vaguely at Alice. Then she looked at David. ‘Alice stammers,’ she said. ‘I wonder why?’ She eyed the remnants of strewn supper with indifference and returned fairly promptly to the coalshed.

  The unexpected result of Alice’s allotting daily time to the younger children’s reading was Iona’s evident jealousy. She, who had hitherto affected to regard Alice as little more than Roland’s sidekick, now took to lingering in Alice’s room and finding excuses to stay. Alice, who could not hear the little ones with Iona so loomingly present, sought to divert her on one of these occasions with the loan of The Divine Miss Davidene Delight. Iona opened one of the books at random and screamed with laughter.

  ‘ “But she has the most heavenly new hat, Minerva, to match those sea-green eyes. And yet quite serviceable too, I think. You would not consider it an extravagance.”’

  It was only when Roland appeared that she was prevailed upon to leave. ‘But listen to this, Roland,’ Iona said, dawdling insistently and mincing through Jem’s prose.

  ‘Diana flung herself in a reverie upon the ancient oaken bench alongside the bun queue—’

  ‘Bun queue?’ Roland said absently. Iona struck a Sarah Bernhardt pose for him in the doorway. It was lost on him because he had sat down to consult the sports pages of his daily newspaper.

  ‘ “She has signed her name in my autograph book. Only imagine, Minerva. The divine Miss Delight agreed to sign! And she has done so in green Indian ink. It is as green as the ocean. Ab, Minerva dearest, the sea will be my element!”’

  Roland was focused on the county cricket scores. ‘On your way then, Minerva dearest,’ he said.

  Iona looked at Alice. ‘Only if I can have some more of these,’ she said.

  ‘If you like,’ Alice said. She lent Iona the first six exercise books containing My Last Duchess.

  ‘Thanks,’ Iona said, and she carried them off to her matt-black bedroom to pore over them in private.

  In the case of My Last Duchess, the effect upon Iona was really rather extraordinary. Within the week she had bought herself a typewriter, considerably more antique than that of her mother and funded on the back of Maya’s stolen cashcard. She baldly informed Roland of this as he was overhauling it for her at Alice’s desk. Iona was sprawled indolently beside him on the floor, smoking and piling up her cigarette ends in the damp dregs of a coffee mug. The typewriter appealed to Roland who was fond of fine old mechanisms. He accorded it all the respect which he showed for his pretty old Citroën DS. It was puzzling to Alice that he took considerably more interest in the typewriter than h
e had ever taken in Thomas and Sophie’s progress, though they were bright little children and had romped ahead with remarkable speed to The King of the Golden River.

  ‘Rather a pity that it’s lost its H,’ he said with respect.

  ‘Sod the fucking H!’ Iona said vehemently. ‘Christ, Roland! How do you get to be so fucking anal? If you didn’t have a fucking size eight cricket bat shoved permanently up your arse, I reckon you’d be a really OK bloke.’

  ‘Could be that you mean a long Harrow, Iona,’ Roland said agreeably, without looking up from his renovations.

  ‘What?’ Iona said.

  ‘After a size six you get a short Harrow and a long Harrow,’ Roland said.

  ‘Fuck!’ Iona said. ‘Cricket bats. Who gives a fuck? And I don’t give a fuck about the H on that thing either. Just make it go. I mean who needs H? Old Wurzel Gummidge downstairs in the rat hole’s got H and where the fuck has it ever got her?’

  Roland’s cough was the best he could manage in the circumstances to convey a semblance of polite neutrality. He fitted a sheet of paper carefully into the roller and wound it on.

  ‘We’ll keep the language in check a bit, shall we?’ he said, but only half seriously, and he tapped at the space bar until the bell rang, making a nice little ‘ting’. ‘We have two ladies in our midst.’ He meant Alice and Sophie. Alice yearned right then not to be one of the ladies, but it seemed that there was little she could do about it. The manner which Roland exhibited with Iona – a manner halfway between borstal instructor and messmate – was one she envied, though she was not aware how much it could have helped to bring out her own dormant liveliness. Roland so depended upon her stillness.

  ‘Ladies?’ Iona said. ‘Where? Do you mean virgins, Roland?’

  Roland worked on in a stiff, schoolmasterish silence, as if he hadn’t heard. He tapped out ‘the quick brown fox’, first in lower case and then in upper case. After that he typed out all the numbers and the signs. Then he shut the case and stood up, lifting the typewriter carefully from below.