Man at the Helm

by Stibbe, Nina

  We trudged home in silence. I tried to speak to my sister to say, ‘How awful!’ or something, but all she would say was, ‘Look out for catkins, Lizzie.’

  And then, having picked a new bunch close to home, I held them out for her to inspect. She took them and looked at them and then flung them down and walked quickly on. I didn’t catch up because seeing someone try not to cry is one of the saddest things to see. I lagged behind and looked for catkins.

  Our mother kept Dr Kaufmann’s little pills with her purse in the fruit bowl. She took the stated dose and apparently felt better and calmer. My sister said we shouldn’t make anything (too positive) of this calmness because people who take pills often act out the effects they are expecting to feel and in the case of these particular pills our mother was certainly expecting to feel calmer.

  ‘So, it could all be an act?’ I said.

  ‘Sort of,’ said my sister. And added, ‘It’s early days.’

  Overall, she didn’t seem that much better to me, just sleepy, like a darted bear that can no longer object or maul. She occasionally got the giggles if anyone said ‘cheeks’ or ‘crumpet’ but there’d always be a short delay and she’d soon forget what it was that set her off, by which time we’d be laughing at her laughing and she’d say, ‘What are we laughing at?’ and we’d all stop. It was nice to be laughing, though.

  Our mother continued to write the play, but less so and only after she’d read to us from The Hobbit, which seemed to go on for years, and if she’d reached the necessary level of inebriation, which was usually around 8.30 p.m. The necessary level lasted only a short while, then she’d be too drunk and simply listen to music, though very quietly. Rachmaninov, who resembled her father-in-law as a young man with his nice mouth and dark eyes, or Bob Dylan, who looked like he might be from The Hobbit.

  With our mother in this reduced and carefree state and without Mrs Lunt’s daily toilings – mopping floors, heaving great baskets about the place and replenishing the Dairylea – our new home soon became horribly untidy and chaotic. We left the shutters at the front of the house half closed – we didn’t want anyone seeing in too clearly.

  Instead of ignoring the situation like any normal children, my sister and I got involved and gleaned from a tattered booklet how to use the washing machine – we felt it imperative as things were piling up and we were re-wearing dirty clothes out of the Ali Baba. But the booklet was from a Hoovermatic de-luxe twin-tub and our machine wasn’t a Hoovermatic de-luxe or a twin-tub, so it was partly guesswork. We found a basic cycle that whirled everything around in warm water for a few hours and stuck to that one.

  We had mishaps – a few catastrophic. Twice the door was left open, once when a corner of a towel was trapped and once when it was just not closed, and the boot room flooded. Those times of flood were the worst times because so many things got wet and spoiled, including a runner in the hall that had been woven by twenty-one girls for twenty-one days and had cost twenty-one rials – each girl earning one precious coin. We flung it over the line for a few days. It dried out OK but it went and stayed stiff and smelled like a wet dog for ever after. We felt guilty about the twenty-one girls, their hard work ruined.

  Worse by far, though, was the second flood and the resulting ruination of the balsa-wood boxes that our mother’s father had brought for her from India. Especially as he had died just a short while before the second flood and she hadn’t even said goodbye. Mind you, she’d never really said hello either as he’d been at war when she was born. And when my sister asked if he had died peacefully our mother replied, ‘Yes, he ceased upon the midnight with no pain.’ Which meant he had been put to sleep by a doctor as if he were a poorly pet because it was the kindest thing, and came from Keats.

  Anyway, the warm soapy water from the second flood washed away the beautiful hand-painted elephants, ladies, birds and so forth from the Indian boxes. And caused the sides to buckle and swell and when we tried to rescue them the staples popped off and they collapsed into a smudgy heap.

  And we did an awful thing. We put the spoiled boxes into rubble bags and put them out for the bin-men and never said a word to our mother about what had happened. We thought she’d never notice. We knew it unlikely that she’d ever again go into the boot room now she was taking Dr Kaufmann’s helpful pills. And I don’t think she ever did. And later it occurred to me just how very bad it was. Not us causing the flood or hiding the broken boxes, but that she’d never again think about them or remember them or wonder about them. Even though she’d loved them so very much.

  The full impact of Mrs Lunt giving us up dawned on us gradually in that boot room, as did the full horror of doing laundry. Mishaps continued and it became very stressful. Many items of clothing came out ruined – hard and small or the wrong colour or matted, or twisted like lengths of ancient rope, discarded rags washed up on beaches.

  Then there was the drying of it. The hanging it on the line for all to see or on the two wires strung across the boot room. The smell of it when we didn’t get to it in time or the weather was humid.

  And then there was the ironing. It was dreadful how crumpled everything looked and how depressing the crumpledness was – it being such a sign. A thousand little creases, not a few deep and straight ironed-in lines, but the chaos of the crumple, like wayward microscopic worms shouting, ‘No one cares any more, make us wards of court.’

  I decided one particularly crumpled day to ‘do’ the ironing: (a) I had to get rid of the creases for our ventures into public (school) and (b) I remembered the aroma of hot linen from Mrs Lunt’s daily ironing drifting around the house as a happy thing, and therefore I thought that in doing the ironing I’d be killing at least two birds.

  ‘Where’s the iron?’ I asked our mother.

  ‘The iron what?’ she yawned.

  ‘The actual iron, for ironing things with?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s gone awol,’ she said.

  She often said things had gone awol and I was never sure what awol meant. I thought it meant ‘nipped out of a left-open gate’ because the thing that most often went awol was our Labrador. And her going awol meant she’d nipped out of a left-open gate.

  I found the iron eventually in a big cupboard that wasn’t anyone’s business except the daily help’s. But since we had no help it became my business and my sister’s. It contained the iron and the ironing board and some soda crystals and buckets, brushes and a small mangle, folded tablecloths and other things of that sort.

  Getting the ironing board up was a job in itself and I knew why Mrs Lunt, at the old house, had ironed a few items every day, including pants and tea towels, to legitimize the leaving up of the board. Doing it was awful too. Not as bad as the other aspects of the laundry but bad all the same. First of all, if the iron was hot enough to make any inroad on the creases it soon began sticking to the clothes. I melted a hole in a favourite nightie and made an iron-shaped brown mark on a T-shirt. I ironed a bit of my own exposed stomach and twice the iron fell to the floor and once a bit of it broke off as a result.

  My sister came to look at me and said I was doing more harm than good. I mentioned the smell of hot linen and the sense of well-being and she said it smelled to her as if a blacksmith had gone berserk burning horse hooves and wasn’t at all pleasant.

  My sister and I saw first-hand how utterly terrible housework was (laundry being particularly horrific) and that it was never-ending and tyrannical. We went to our mother and asked how she thought we might cope now she was semi-conscious much of the time. She explained that she herself was temperamentally unsuited to housework and laundry and always had been – even before the pills had kicked in. And hearing there was such a thing as temperamental unsuitability to it, we realized we were probably afflicted in the same way and felt a bit better about everything. Of course it’s a shaming thing to look back on, but there it was.

  And all of a sudden we realized that Mrs Lunt was obviously suited to housework and saw her in a new light – as capa
ble, strong, unusual – and felt wretched and stupid for letting her go without more of a fight. Our mother sympathized with us but said there was no easy solution. Helps like Mrs Lunt were thin on the ground in villages and, like the Brownies and Scouts, had waiting lists as long as your arm and you had to swoop whenever one came free and try to engage them before anyone else got there. There was a story of an elderly lady on her deathbed having to endure people knocking on the door, swooping for the daily help.

  We knew of only one available woman in the parish. This woman had a card in the newsagent’s. This woman, Audrina, was good at cleaning apparently but was also a spirit medium – a fact advertised on the same card. We mentioned Audrina to our mother but she didn’t want a spirit medium hanging about at our house doing laundry. We didn’t know what a medium actually was – my sister thought a prostitute but I thought something to do with ghosts. I strongly suspected I was right – our mother wouldn’t have minded a prostitute hanging about doing laundry.

  Anyway, our mother said we should just try to pull together as a team and, if the worst came to the absolute worst, we’d have to go to the Three Sisters in Malby and buy some new T-shirts and pants. We should have told her then about the water-damaged rug and Indian boxes – to indicate the worst had already come. But we didn’t, thinking what’s the point of going on tranquillizers to cheer yourself up if your daughters keep delivering really sad news? So we let sleeping dogs lie.

  With all this in mind my sister wrote to Mrs Lunt.

  Dear Mrs Lunt,

  You are so right – petrol has shot up in price. Some say it will soon be ten bob a gallon in old money. But we are finding it difficult to keep up with all the laundry and housework here. It would be an enormous help if you would reconsider your decision to leave and actually start coming again. You don’t have to come every day, just two or three longer days would probably be enough and use less petrol than coming every day.

  The thing is, Mrs Lunt, I am temperamentally unsuited for housework (and it turns out so are the girls) whereas you are 100 per cent suited. Plus it’s imperative to have it done, especially the laundry which has piled up like Mount Sorrel.

  Please telephone Lizzie or myself if it’s ‘yes’, otherwise just forget I ever wrote.

  I hope you are well.

  Yours truly,

  Elizabeth Vogel (Mrs)

  Mrs Lunt didn’t telephone and the house got more and more messy. Also, no nanny would come to live with us in the village either, even though they’d have had their own bathroom, a little telly, the use of a Mercedes and a minimum of two ponies to choose from. The nanny agency sent two candidates in taxis to view us but both hated the idea of having to drive the Mercedes such a long and windy way into town for a film or a new bra, and they didn’t even ask our mother what the salary was (and that said it all).

  After all those years cooped up with amber-eyed Moira and her predecessors, it was nice to be free to go where we wanted on our own and not have to do what the nanny wanted us to do, such as play endless games of Who Am I? and drink Nesquik. Though it did occur to us that a nanny might have usefully contributed to the laundry effort.

  We wandered freely around the village and peeped into car windows to see if any dogs had been left inside. We chucked hard apples into the pond, sat in the pear trees and visited fierce-looking bulls, and we looked for Debbie, our dog, who kept running away. Not away away, but just enjoying the freedom of no one shutting the gate.

  7

  My sister and I started going to London on our own on the train, with a bit of cash and a Whizzer and Chips for me, and whatever book my sister was reading at the time. Ruby Ferguson or Gerald Durrell.

  Our trips to London began because although our mother was happy with the pills overall, she soon realized she couldn’t get quite enough to keep up with her feelings of loneliness and misery. And she’d started taking slightly more than the stated dose. Plus she needed a different kind in addition, to help give her that bit more vim. Dr Kaufmann would not prescribe any more pills, however eloquent and reasonable our mother’s requests for more. It would have been wrong.

  So much for my sister’s worry that they might make her feel ‘too better’ – they soon weren’t making her feel better enough. ‘It’s like having over-diluted Ribena,’ our mother explained. ‘It’s almost worse than having no Ribena at all.’

  And we knew exactly what she was talking about.

  In order to get more pills, our mother had to go to London to get topped up by a doctor who turned a blind eye. This was OK for a while, but soon she got sick of going all that way and once had a breakdown (in her car) halfway home and had to call our father’s chauffeur, Bernard, and he’d given her snooty looks in the rear-view mirror all the way home, and later our father had rung and accused her of upsetting Bernard and giving him snooty looks and said she needn’t think she could cadge a lift again.

  Anyway, that incident put the tin lid on the London trips and she got herself into a panic about getting enough pills – thinking she might have to hang around outside a library in the dark or something horrible and do a deal.

  My sister wondered if our mother might take on Audrina, the available help who was also a medium, to go and hang around outside a library once she’d done the laundry but our mother was against this idea. It being her belief that you should only break the law yourself and not get others to do it for you.

  So my sister and I told her we were more than happy to go to London for her. I amended it quickly to ‘happy to go’ (thinking that being ‘more than happy’ might be the same as being ‘more than welcome’ – i.e., not). She was very grateful for the offer but said we were far too young to be going to get pills in London on our own.

  The train was inky blue with a yellow nose. I’d been expecting it to roar into the station and screech to a halt like a car might, but it didn’t. It rolled in ever so slowly with a face like a sad puppy and little wipers on the two side windows blinking. It had come from Sheffield and wasn’t going to remain for long in the station, so we had to jump aboard quickly and get settled in our seats. I loved it. The tickets, the station, the smell, the noises, the mysterious other people, the lurching rhythms of the forward motion and the tiny little toilet. We bought ourselves tea and toast from the buffet car and actually would both have liked our tea a bit less milky, but you can’t have everything, and the toast was utterly perfect: darkly grilled, buttered to the edges and sweating in its napkin.

  London was approximately two hours away and Dr Gilbey’s rooms were on Devonshire Place – a short taxi ride from St Pancras station. On our first trip, my sister decided to take a detour via London zoo. She’d planned it all along but she dropped it on me as a surprise as we waited in the taxi rank.

  ‘Shall we go to London zoo?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think so, we don’t have time,’ I replied.

  ‘We do,’ she said. ‘We don’t need to be at Devonshire Place for two and a half hours.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’m going to the zoo,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you at Devonshire Place later.’ And of course that was that. I mean, you don’t just walk round London on your own when you’re ten and you don’t even know the place.

  I honestly don’t remember much about the zoo that first time, except Chi Chi the giant panda. There was a long notice on an information board about Chi Chi. We read that Chi Chi displayed all the symptoms of chronic loneliness, and yet had confounded bear-breeding experts when she refused to mate with the only available male, An An, who’d been brought over all the way from Moscow zoo in a crate especially for that purpose.

  And my sister had said, ‘Hey, just like Mum and Mr Lomax.’ And we’d laughed.

  Mainly I remember that my sister loved being at the zoo and was utterly captivated by certain young animals and seemed to want to gaze at them for ever.

  And when it was time to leave the zoo and go to Devonshire Place, she complained that we�
�d not seen half of it and begged for another ten minutes which turned into twenty and then, when we did finally leave, lots of other people wanted to leave too and there was a very long line at the taxi rank. I suggested that I pretend to be very ill and ask to jump the queue to get to a hospital. But my sister is less deceitful than me. We did ask to go to the front, our reason being that we needed to get to Devonshire Place to get our mother’s pills. No one felt it a good enough reason to let us jump in and everyone ignored us, looking away and pretending to chat, but looking at us again when we turned away. We stood at the end feeling foolish. It was just like being back in the village.

  We decided it would be quicker (and less embarrassing) to walk, so we did and we ended up lost and then very late. When we finally arrived at Devonshire Place the enormous shiny door was shut and didn’t have a real knocker, only an ornamental knob bang in the middle. My sister rang the bell and rang and rang. I looked around.

  The street – or should I say the ‘place’, since it was a place, not a street – was a row of very tall terraced houses each with its own identical set of black-painted railings, the same set of windows (smaller and less impressive the higher you went up, so that the top windows were just rectangles of grubby glass), the same large black front door and door furniture. The houses were identical except for one, halfway along the terrace, whose paint was beginning to peel and whose window box contained browning geraniums, petals from which were dropping into the cracked paint and bleeding their browny-red juice into the cream, making it all unkempt and messy.