Man at the Helm

by Stibbe, Nina

  Soon we left the brick dust and fumes of the city and all the people we’d known. We didn’t see Mrs Vanderbus ever again. She herself didn’t drive and her chauffeur, Mr Mason, had had his leg amputated and she couldn’t afford to keep two (chauffeurs).

  We drove away in our mother’s old Mercedes, Gloxinia, following the blue whale. Then, somewhere just beyond the smart garage doors of the nice suburb (and its thousand bendy saplings), our mother stalled the engine on a roundabout and the whale floated on without us and Little Jack’s lip began to quiver. He’d had enough of being left behind.

  ‘Shit,’ said our mother, but Gloxinia started up again and somehow knew the way and we carried on past the rusty corrugations of the less nice suburb and into the fringes with warehouses and badly built shelters and then the countryside and the cheaper villages with abundant bus stops. Then, in the greenest loveliness we’d ever seen, we caught up with the whale again as it bashed its way through unruly hawthorns on its way to our new home. My sister stuck her head out of the car window and said, ‘Smell the fresh air.’ So we did. It didn’t smell of anything but no one said so.

  On entering the village my sister read the sign. ‘This is our village,’ she said delightedly, and our mother said, ‘Jesus fucking wept.’ But we took no notice of her mood. The sign read: FLATSTONE – HOME OF THE FLATSTONE MUNTIE. We discovered later that munties were greasy little mutton pasties traditionally served on Flatstone Day, a day in June when the children of the village would hide coins and pasties under flat stones in ancient gateways for soldiers travelling homeward from old wars.

  As we entered the village the Leonard’s of Leicester lorry clipped a tree and brought down a low-hanging branch in a great destructive crash. It had to be dealt with before we could go on and all of a sudden the quiet street was lined with grey curly-haired people with angry eyes and wellington boots. But we ignored that too and stayed delighted.

  For a few dreamy days we had no idea of the sadness this little village was going to cause – more than all the uncomfortable nannies, homosexual fathers, unloving grannies, absconding family and non-existent best friends put together. It was going to stare at us in the Co-op and never want to make friends with us and our little family would be worn ragged trying to please it. But we didn’t know that then; we still had a few days of discovery and all the fresh air we could possibly want.

  Typically, and to our dismay, our mother straight away began on a play. Before she’d even unpacked, explored or knocked on any neighbours’ doors to say hello etc. The play, called The Vicus, illustrated her misgivings about the immediate situation as well as addressing some old and persistent themes. That was how the play(s) worked.

  Adele: I’m not sure this village is the best place for us.

  Roderick: Nonsense, it’s the countryside and very good for children.

  Adele: But it’s stultifying for me.

  Roderick: Yes, but villages are the best place for children.

  Adele: I’m not sure I know how to conduct myself in a village.

  Roderick: To signify that one has finished eating, place the knife and fork at the five o’clock position.

  Adele: What if I haven’t finished but I’m having a cigarette break?

  Roderick: If one is still eating, the fork must be placed at the eight o’clock position and the knife at the four o’clock.

  It was just the four of us in the end because Moira the amber-eyed nanny had decided at the eleventh hour she wanted to remain in the city and not have the fresh air.

  ‘Why didn’t Moira come?’ I asked quietly, so my brother wouldn’t hear.

  ‘She doesn’t want to live in a village,’ said our mother.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s obviously not as stupid as she looks,’ said our mother.

  I was secretly pleased. I had my own list of things I didn’t like about Moira (pulling at her top lip, saying ‘Lordy’ and always going on about calcium). Also, being nanny-less always felt as though we might have more adventures (and less milk) – which I preferred. I’d love to say more about Moira but she’s not in the story, so I’ll leave it there.

  Little Jack – who loved Moira and hated change (especially enormous change at the last minute) – didn’t notice her absence until the next morning. And then, in his troubled state, he made the prediction that a crab was going to rap at the door, pincer us and gobble us up. It was troubling to hear, because his predictions almost always came true in some way or another. He was like one of those people in a film who say hysterical things that no one wants to hear. Things that then happen.

  Only moments after we’d translated Little Jack’s messy and hesitant words (he had a stammer when upset), a loud buzzing noise made us all freeze and look at each other.

  ‘It’s the crab,’ stammered Little Jack in all seriousness. But it wasn’t. It was the Liberal candidate, Mr Lomax, at the door. Mr Lomax also happened to be the builder who had come to put the finishing touches to one or two jobs on behalf of the vendor.

  ‘We thought you were going to be a crab,’ said my sister, to explain the delay in answering the door and the fearful faces that had greeted him.

  ‘No, no, I’m human,’ said Mr Lomax, and that made me like him and my sister offered him a cup of tea. He said he’d prefer a mug of hot water and I stopped liking him. I think you should just have what’s offered or say, ‘No, thanks’ – otherwise you’re being demanding. Anyway, Mr Lomax got on with the jobs with the radio going and went to the toilet twice, once for about twenty minutes.

  As soon as Mr Lomax had completed the little jobs and gone, we set about putting our mother’s books onto the wall of shelving in her sitting room. They were to be arranged alphabetically as in a library, she instructed. And hearing that made it seem like fun. It wasn’t though, because it’s difficult arranging things alphabetically if you don’t even know the alphabet, which my sister apparently didn’t as she kept asking questions about J, K and L and the later letters and then it turned out that Little Jack – who, like most stammerers, very much did know the alphabet – had been ordering them by author’s first name. This came to light when I noticed Arnold Bennett and Arnold Wesker next to each other on account of the Arnold and that was doubly bad because we’d been instructed to make separate shelves for plays.

  Anyway, there we were, up the sturdy library ladder that came as part of the shelving system, when the buzzer went again and this time it was Mrs Longlady, a villager. Mrs Longlady had solid curls set into her beige hair and you could see quite a lot of scalp. She didn’t say exactly who she was or why she’d come, only that she basically ran things in the village and she’d wanted to say, ‘Welcome to Flatstone.’

  Our mother came into the hall looking pretty with a headscarf tied at the back. She looked as though she’d been unpacking though she’d actually been writing a play. Mrs Longlady said, ‘Welcome to Flatstone,’ and they shook hands. Mrs Longlady peered in at the activity around the bookshelves.

  ‘Ah, books,’ she said. ‘Goodness gracious, have you read all those, Mrs Vogel?’

  And our mother, who hated people saying ‘Goodness gracious’ (thinking goodness or gracious on their own were enough) and asking pointless questions, replied, ‘A few of them.’

  Mrs Longlady told us she lived on the other side of the bakery and we should get in touch if we needed any accountancy work done because her husband did the accounts for the village and also had an interest in fruit trees, wood and bees, should we need advice in those areas. She also issued an invitation for us to go and have ‘a short supervised tea’ at their house with her twin girls at some point in the near future.

  Our new house was nice – formerly three tiny cottages, now one charming family dwelling (as on the property particulars) with a newly crafted curving staircase in rare timber that had been featured in a magazine. Not that the interesting staircase was of any interest to us, but we did love the stables with their doors in half – exactly as they were
on our farm set – and the great corner mangers. We loved the bigness of the pear trees bang in the middle of the paddock. We loved Merryfield’s bakery which sent nice bun smells wafting over the wall.

  Best of all I liked the miles of fieldy vistas beyond the paddock. And the plywood platform that some previous person had put up in one of the pear trees – from where you could make out feudal hillocks in the agricultural patchwork, the squat grey tower of a Saxon church (that we would later visit at least three times each with school) and ancient trees whose lines marked out old lanes. Tweeting birds filled the hedgerows and trees from dawn to dusk, and cattle grazed behind and sometimes stood near a muddy trough and we’d look at their kind eyes as they queued for water.

  The new house was – adventure-wise – a vast improvement on the old one, which had offered only things that adults might admire (such as a grapevine in an old glass lean-to) but not children, only a pissy sandpit and deep, dark cellar. Though the new house was nice and the fieldy vistas enthralling, we soon began to notice that hardly anyone in the village liked us. It was plain to see. People looked at us but no one smiled or stroked Debbie, our nice-looking Labrador. And we looked away and that probably made us seem furtive, but then again not looking away would have made us seem mad. And though I felt sure they’d warm up given time, my sister said they never would (like us, or stroke Debbie) until we had a man at the helm.

  Sure enough, the months went by and Brown Owl from the Scout and Brownie hut, who seemed a reasonable woman, never called to say our names had reached the top of the list, even though our mother called in and made enquiries. And, apart from Mrs Longlady’s theoretical tea, we were never invited anywhere. We weren’t asked to take part in the Flatstone Day parade and never saw, let alone tasted, a mutton muntie. No one wanted to play with us – their mothers didn’t want them to. Gradually I gathered (from mounting snippets) that the problem was – exactly as my sister had warned – our mother’s divorcedness. That she, and therefore we, were not to be trusted. Mrs Longlady herself, who’d come round that second day asking about our mother’s books and saying her husband was an accountant, gave us suspicious looks from her Hillman. Also, one of Mrs Longlady’s twins, Miranda, claimed that an old woman had been forcefully evicted from one of the three cottages that made up our house and now lived in misery in a hovel with mushrooms growing on the stairs. My sister said she was talking rubbish and that hovels didn’t even have stairs.

  And, to add to the sense of us being untrustworthy and manless, our father soon got over us (and his love affair with Phil from the factory) and married a handsome woman from London with a perfectly symmetrical face and fluffy hair, and we weren’t invited to – or even told about – the wedding. Their picture was in the Mercury and it gave my sister a stomach-ache. And they started having children straight away. Which, in a way, was exciting to hear about, but, in another, felt like we were being painted over with a brighter colour. My sister said she supposed we should be pleased for him and glad that in the future we’d have a whole new set of people to call on at Xmas time and Easter. And that has certainly been the case.

  And, worse than all of that – day-to-day-wise – Mrs Lunt wrote a card saying she wouldn’t be able to be our help any more, blaming the price of petrol. But wishing us happiness in our new home. Our mother was brave about Mrs Lunt, but we knew it was a terrible blow because on reading the card she’d let out a tiny cry of sad surprise that made us all look up. She covered it up by saying, ‘Ha! The Lunt has got the message at last.’

  I was disappointed because I’d been looking forward to making Mrs Lunt a cup of tea, a thing I’d learned to do since the move, and had kept imagining presenting her with her favourite cup (plain white with a yellow rim) brimming with tea and saying, ‘Tea, Mrs Lunt?’ and her saying, ‘Well, I never.’

  Finally, albeit chronically (and as predicted), our mother’s family did indeed seem happy to let her slip into lonely abandonment. It was fair enough, they weren’t bad people – they were/are very nice, actually – they just didn’t want her embarrassing them – manless – at their get-togethers and little cocktail parties. And word spread among them that she’d become a menace and a drunk. And so she did (become a menace and a drunk) and, worse than that, she dug her nails into the soap and settled into her play-writing.

  And our mother was pretty much all alone and unhappy and only thirty-one years of age and with us three and a Labrador in a small, slightly hostile village. It was no wonder, when you put it like that, that she became a menace and a drunk and a playwright.

  Adele: I see you’ve remarried.

  Roderick: Yes, a more accomplished woman with a nice tinkling laugh.

  Adele: But plumper?

  Roderick: Well, not a boyish stick like you.

  Adele: But you like boyish sticks.

  Roderick: Not any more. I now prefer accomplished pears.

  It wasn’t long before I was forced to admit to my sister that she had been 100 per cent right about things, which I thought a decent thing to do. Not satisfied with that, my sister then informed me that our mother’s unhappiness and manlessness and play-writing could have further damaging implications for us unless we managed to nip it in the bud (which could be tricky as it might be way past the bud stage by now, thanks to my denial of the problem). She explained that children of the chronically unhappy (particularly the manless and unhappy) often became wards of court, and children who became wards of court had their skin pinched day in, day out by the people who should be caring for them and only had spaghetti on toast for tea and sometimes not even on toast but with Jacob’s Cream Crackers broken up and sprinkled on top as a toast substitute. And I could really imagine the unpleasant combination and the disappointment (toast being the best thing about anything on toast) and it hit home. And that wasn’t all. My sister went on: in addition to the constant pinching, there was no chance whatsoever of having a pony, a dog or even a guinea pig.

  I said I’d probably cope with the ponylessness and the pinchings – a small part of me excited by the thought of an ongoing battle with a pinching carer (and secretly not wanting my own pony anyway) – but my sister had heard true tales from the dreaded Crescent Homes (the children’s home two villages away) and she assured me that wards of court were always dragged into sadness, however sunny their disposition at the start of it.

  So, we agreed that our main aim in life would be to find a new husband for our mother. Not only for her happiness but to keep ourselves from being made wards of court and ending up in the Crescent Homes. We were realistic about it – we didn’t expect her to be going out with a new man every week, we knew the dating game was tricky – we’d read enough magazines. In between times we’d have to find other bits and bobs of happiness to be going on with in a bid to lure her away from her play(s) and help her enjoy real life for a moment or two, with a view to it becoming the norm.

  We decided we’d contact, by letter, the suitable men in the area and invite them to have a drink with her and hope that it would lead to sexual intercourse and possibly marriage. Obviously one at a time. My sister asked me to name the top three qualities I’d look for in a husband. It was difficult because I knew so little about men, only really that they loved fires and omelettes and needed constant snacks.

  I began by saying I’d look for an enthusiastic television watcher. And was about to say I’d want someone ‘down-to-earth’ but could see that my sister wasn’t listening. Like all people who ask for your favourite or top three things, she was merely waiting to tell me hers. When I’d noticed other people doing this, I’d always thought it might be better if the person asking just said, ‘May I tell you the top three things I look for?’ And that way you’re not wasting time thinking up your top three things (just so they feel justified in saying theirs). The worst offender in this regard was Little Jack, usually over Roman emperors or pies.

  Anyway, my sister began on her top three qualities in a man. She felt strongly that we needed a man who w
ould answer the front door and generally be authoritative, and someone who really loved animals and would nurse a sick one back to health by hand, and possibly a landowner.

  Little Jack joined in and said he liked a man with deep pockets. Not meaning it metaphorically but literally – him having just gone into pocketed trousers himself and thrilled at the possibilities. He also wanted someone with an interest in owls and Romans.

  We devised a vetting process based on a list of questions with yes/no/don’t-know answers, mainly pertaining to a man’s appreciation of animals and television, his susceptibility to certain ailments – in particular catarrh, which our mother couldn’t stand, even the word (or any form of sinusitis or nose blowing) – and a good swimmer (likely to want seaside holidays). And pockets.

  Once Little Jack was out of the way, we compiled a list of possible men. When I objected to one or two that my sister had included, she said, ‘Let’s not rule anyone out at this stage.’

  ‘But Mr Longlady is married,’ I said, ‘to Mrs Longlady.’ I mentioned his wife, Mrs Longlady, by name because being married to Mrs Longlady was a lot more serious than being married to anyone else.

  ‘They’re all married,’ she said, ‘except for Mr Lomax, and he would be married except he’s slightly retarded and no one probably would want to.’