Man at the Helm

by Stibbe, Nina

  Our mother wasn’t quite so happy on the many evenings Charlie didn’t come over and often reverted to play-writing. And even though he hadn’t been on the list or properly vetted, my sister and I agreed that, though less than ideal, Charlie was better than nothing. For now.

  Our father phoned to invite my sister and me to stay a night. Little Jack wasn’t invited as a punishment for having bolted from the car the time before when the chauffeur stopped for petrol.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said, speaking for my sister and myself, because in those days visits to divorced fathers’ houses were awkward and to be avoided.

  ‘Oh, but it would be lovely to see you both,’ he said, sounding genuinely disappointed, ‘especially after last time.’ Meaning the time before Little Jack had bolted, when we had cancelled at the last minute due to me having a rash and them not wanting me to infect the baby.

  ‘The thing is, I feel awkward with Vivian and the baby,’ I said, thinking honesty was the best policy and knowing that any other objection would just be solved.

  ‘I see. Well, why don’t we have lunch in town on Friday instead?’ he said. ‘Then it’ll just be us … I’ll send Bernard to collect you.’

  I was pleased in the end that this had cropped up as it occurred to me that spending some time with our father (a proper and intelligent man with manners and nice teeth) without the complications of his new family would give us the opportunity to assess Charlie against him. I suspected it would throw Charlie’s failings into sharp relief and that we’d see him for what he was – i.e., not quite up to the job of man at the helm.

  When Friday came I chivvied my sister to get ready, but she said she was busy. And said she wouldn’t go to Fenwick’s dining room even if she wasn’t – it being so utterly snobby and full of old grannies eating slowly with clunking great knives and forks. I begged her to come and I’m ashamed to say I cried at the thought of the journey in the Daimler followed by lunch in Fenwick’s alone with our father and all that cutlery. But she said she wasn’t going and that was that.

  It was a prospect so dreadful – the being alone with a parent, apart from everything else – that I revealed my illegal friendship with Melody Longlady (albeit only to our mother, who was good at being understanding about that kind of thing and not telling) and asked if I should invite her along to act as a buffer. Our mother advised me strongly against it, reminding me that an invitation might put Melody in an awkward position and then she might need a buffer.

  So I asked our mother to insist that my sister came with me. She said my sister had every right to not want to go (because, in all honesty, who would?) but agreed that she might have made her intentions known a bit earlier.

  ‘Why not take Little Jack with you?’ our mother suggested.

  ‘He’s banned because of running away – remember?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, just take him,’ said our mother.

  ‘But what if he runs away again?’ I said.

  ‘Hold on to him,’ said our mother.

  ‘It’s a long journey,’ I moaned.

  ‘You’ll manage,’ she said.

  Soon I had Jack on the dog lead and he was really annoyed and pully, like disobedient dogs sometimes are. I explained calmly and in the style of my teacher, Miss Thorne, ‘This is what happens to little boys who run away from their father’s chauffeur.’

  Bernard arrived and wasn’t at all keen to carry Little Jack as a passenger after the last time, but I showed him the restraining device.

  ‘If he bolts off, he’s on his own,’ said Bernard.

  ‘He won’t be able to,’ I said, holding up the plaited leather leash.

  We got into the back of the car and drove the short distance to Bagshaw Bridge service station. I can explain now why Bernard the chauffeur always liked to fill up there. It was because the manager had fitted a device to the fuel nozzle that made it stop flowing when the tank was full and a little latch so that the nozzle could rest on its own. This freed the attendant up to do other little jobs such as clean the windscreen or check the water, which he did quite happily for free. Bernard knew of no other service station in all of England that did this. Though in the USA – where he had lived for many years as chauffeur to a Congressman – helpful attendants with nozzle devices were the norm. Bernard considered this country of ours to be a backward-looking little dump and the drivers here idiots, happy to put up with insufficient oil checks and smeary windscreens. That’s why he liked going to Bagshaw Bridge service station and ditto why he liked collecting us for my father (if you didn’t count little kids running off).

  Knowing it was Jack’s getaway point last time, I held on quite tight for the duration of the stop and watched for signs. But once we were on the road again, Little Jack fell asleep and lay right down with his head on my leg and it was like having a real dog with me. Soon the collar flopped loosely over Jack’s shirt and I chomped on pear drops to ward off carsickness. Bernard puffed away on his cigarette and switched on the radio.

  ‘Your dad doesn’t like the radio going when he’s on board,’ said Bernard.

  Then the radio started talking about the Apollo missions and he quickly switched it off.

  ‘Don’t you like space?’ I asked, and he said, ‘No, not really, can’t be doing with it.’

  We pootled through suburbia, or, as Bernard called it, the sprawl, and I stared out of the window.

  ‘Two houses, two garages, two houses, two garages,’ said Bernard. ‘If there’s one thing I hate it’s the sound of a garage door clanging up-and-over. Whatever happened to wooden garage doors that open in the normal way?’

  What a strange thing to hate, I thought, and wondered if I’d care about such things at his age, which was roughly forty, I reckoned.

  When Bernard dropped us outside Fenwick’s of Leicester on the corner of Belvoir Street, he told us to go straight up to the fourth-floor dining room and say we were to meet Mr Vogel, and he ruffled Jack’s hair and said, ‘Still with us, Fido?’ and Jack let out a loud bark and Bernard jumped out of his skin and called him a little bastard and drove off.

  Little Jack wouldn’t let me take the lead and collar off, and every time I tried he barked. He insisted on moving through Fenwick’s on all fours, sniffing at things as we went. People stared at us and looked worried. I acted normal. In the lift an old woman said, ‘No dogs allowed,’ and Jack barked at her.

  My father was there in the dining room already and was all smiles (he even commented on my new dramatic hairstyle) until he looked down and saw Little Jack. He told him to get up. Little Jack gave him a quizzical doggy look and barked. Then my father was furious and tried to wrestle the collar off him. Jack growled and bit my father’s hand and scampered under a table where a couple were having roast of the day. The couple lifted the tablecloth to look at him and he started yapping like a terrier. My father bobbed down and tried to take hold of Jack, but Jack snarled and bit him again. The couple called the waitress and Jack snarled at her too. In the end my father dragged him by the lead and bustled him into the lift and apparently gave him a bloody good slap.

  Then Bernard was whisking us home and we’d had no lunch and I told Bernard all about it. Bernard said it was the absolutely funniest thing he’d heard all year. He banged the steering wheel with his palm and said he was going to dine out on it. Him mentioning dining out got us on to the subject of dining out and I asked if we could stop at the Golden Egg for something to eat. Although Bernard had a new respect for Little Jack, he didn’t quite trust him and couldn’t be held responsible. Jack made a few high-pitched barks and I translated that he promised not to run away. In the end Bernard stopped at the Travelin-Man and got us an egg-and-cress roll each and a Kit Kat between us. And Jack stopped being a dog and said thank you in English.

  My sister was 100 per cent jealous that she’d missed out on seeing Jack snapping and biting and barking, so we re-enacted the whole thing and she laughed so much she did a bit of wee and our mother asked us to do it again and she laugh
ed too. It was a great day for Jack. I don’t think he was ever the same again. Knowing you can make an impact on people you want to make an impact on without even speaking or changing your jumper.

  Our father telephoned later to discuss Little Jack’s behaviour. I heard our mother say, ‘Well, what do you expect?’ and then, ‘I’ll ask him to telephone you, if he wants to. It’s up to him.’

  Then we had a family conflab about Jack phoning our father.

  Our mother was very reasonable and supportive of Jack, but she did say she thought Jack should probably phone, bearing in mind he had bitten our father twice, and then we all started laughing again.

  Jack did phone. We all stayed quiet so we could hear him on the phone, but we only heard this:

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘All right, then.’

  ‘Bye.’

  After all that excitement and fun, my sister asked me how Charlie had compared against our father, and though I hated to put a spoke in the wheel I reported that, compared with our father, Charlie seemed like some kind of lunatic.

  ‘Double damn,’ said my sister, and I agreed.

  Charlie said he couldn’t fully relax in our mother’s sitting room the way it was. It was too austere for his taste. He disliked the bare wood floors and the white walls. It reminded him of a whitewashed barn at the centre of an awful experience in his life. His awful times had usually occurred during the war or just before it.

  ‘You need something a bit darker on the walls and a bit of soft,’ he said, meaning cushions, I suppose, and curtains.

  He went on to describe a marvellously soothing and sumptuously romantic wall colour especially devised and produced to promote relaxation in adult lounges.

  ‘It’s called Rendezvous,’ he said. ‘It’s meant to capture the street-lit sky as seen through a New York bar window at night.’

  Or something along those lines. Our mother seemed to like the sound of it and cocked her head to imagine the scene.

  ‘It’s pricey, but if you want a relaxing lounge to relax in properly, then you need to do something with these bloody walls,’ he said, ‘and Rendezvous would suit marvellous.’

  ‘It sounds lovely,’ said our mother.

  ‘It’s hard to source, that particular colour is, but I’ll see what I can do, and you can get that idiot handyman of yours in to slap it on,’ said Charlie.

  And so Mr Lomax arrived plus two large white cans with ‘Ronday-View’ penned on the lids. And no sooner was the sitting room blacked out with the darkest paint you can imagine than Charlie announced, ‘You need a piece of Axminster down to finish it off.’

  Our mother didn’t agree to that, though, being a hater of carpets, but she did agree to a smart rug, which Charlie provided promptly for fifty-five pounds. And some large fluffy cushions for another twenty.

  Soon Little Jack had qualms. He looked out of the window a lot, frowning, and stammered more on the k and m and said things such as, ‘Charlie’s making our world so dark.’ I of course had my own qualms about Charlie. But Little Jack having qualms made more of an impression on my sister. She worried when Jack worried because in spite of never being told anything, he seemed to have a sense of what was underneath and behind everything. Having Little Jack was like having two brothers really. The boy who knew and detected everything and looked out of windows worrying, and the ordinary little boy who wouldn’t take his coat off and had a George Best lampshade.

  My sister, still being largely pro-Charlie, gave Little Jack a project to help soothe his qualms and stop his worries getting out of hand and to give him a sense of purpose. She told Jack of the old saying ‘Know Thine Enemy’, and though she didn’t know why exactly and wasn’t sure Charlie even was our enemy as such, Jack was very excited about having a solo project and set about knowing him via asking him lots of questions.

  Jack had soon gleaned all sorts of information pertaining, including that Charlie had lost a finger and a half in the war, his own fault, not a bomb or a gun but a rusty catch on a door. He couldn’t eat spaghetti because of something that had happened in Italy. He’d never in his life eaten a banana and was allergic to a certain kind of tree – a fir or a pine – he couldn’t be precise, only that he came out in hives in certain weather with a certain tree. He didn’t believe in God, a thing that Jack found troubling to begin with, but not as troubling as the fact that the concept of outer space made him feel sick. And apparently he couldn’t even imagine the planets or hear their names without feeling queasy. It reminded me of Bernard the chauffeur and his Apollo phobia. Finally, he didn’t like German people but liked other types, especially Americans.

  It was all very helpful in knowing Charlie and kept Jack feeling involved. I, however, was more interested in what our mother actually saw in him, so I addressed my questions to her. The main thing seemed to be – according to our mother – that he’d taken to us.

  ‘What do you love so much about Charlie?’ I said one day.

  ‘Well, he’s taken to you lot,’ she said, ‘and that’s the main thing.’

  It wasn’t the main thing at all, but thinking about it, there was just enough truth in it – it seemed that in his rough way he did like us. He found us amusing and liked to amuse us and I can’t tell you how nice that was. And even though one man seeming to like us didn’t compensate for a whole entire village thinking badly of us, it was very nice and perhaps explains why we tried so hard to like him.

  12

  The kids at school were terribly upset by the news and walked around in gloomy disbelief. The news was that O’Donnell’s funfair was cancelled due to an attempted murder.

  My sister and I weren’t all that bothered about the cancellation of the fair and were actually quite pleased about the attempted murder. Firstly, we’d had no experience of O’Donnell’s fair and therefore didn’t know what we’d be missing, but we did like it when anything bad happened in the village, as long as it had nothing to do with us (and since the murder was only attempted and not committed). Looking back, it seems a bit schadenfreudey and mean, but you have to remember the village didn’t like us.

  The reason for the fair being cancelled was that Mr Clegg, on whose land the fair always took place, had committed attempted murder. He’d shot his wife, then run away along a canal bank. It was almost a double-death because Mr Clegg flung himself into the water to drown, but it turned out to be no deaths as the wife was only grazed and Mr Clegg was fished out of the canal before he had time to drown by four members of the ornithology club who were hiding out in the bushes because someone claimed to have seen a very rare egret in that spot. And even if the ornithologists hadn’t been there, there was group of civil engineers working on a very long canal tunnel adjacent to the plunge point who would have fished him out, only the ornithologists got to him first. There was also a dog walker and a farmer nearby.

  That was the thing about this village: you couldn’t do anything without a whole bunch of people knowing about it. You couldn’t even jump into a canal to drown yourself without people queuing up to jump in and drag you out. The village was furious about the shooting, not only because of the cancellation of the fair but because it ended up on the Nine O’Clock News read by Richard Baker and put the village in a bad light. The village blamed the wife for being provocative and wanting too many material things when the poor husband was only on an overlocker’s wage in spite of living on a farm.

  While I’m on the subject, other bad things happened around that time, including a spate of gate-liftings which infuriated the village and ended up in the papers (the village still reeling from the non-fatal shooting). Mrs C. Beard said what did you expect in a recession, but took the precaution of chaining her two gates together so that anyone lifting one gate would have the other to contend with.

  The village hated being in the news for anything other than dog shows and so forth. And hated anything that happened
at night and gate-lifting always happened at night. One night, our own gate was lifted and we were thrilled and our mother refused to ring the constable because she thought he should have better things to do with his time and if he didn’t he might write a play. Ours was one of the few gates to be actually stolen, most being lifted and left to the right of the gate opening. Ours, being pure timber, was taken away and probably used as firewood. We had to have another immediately due to Debbie and this time got a tubular metal one which was very cold to sit on and a bit clangy.

  The thing about having siblings is you can find yourself dragged along their paths and tangled in their worries and prejudices – which often seem more reasoned than your own, especially if you’re unsure of a thing. And so it was with me and my clever, open-eyed big sister.

  She in turn was often unduly influenced by Little Jack’s childish inklings and qualms. But then Little Jack tended to be easily fobbed off by me. It was a circle of anxiety, manipulation and reassurances. And never more than over Charlie Bates, about whom we were quite happy to change our minds overnight and back again the next day, with my sister leading the charge and me towed behind thinking more or less what she thought and Little Jack running to the front and then to the rear. After a week of disliking Charlie, he might suddenly show us how to sneak up on someone from behind, say a soldier you wanted to kill or just anyone you wanted to scare the shit out of. And how to open a locked door with two library cards Sellotaped together or a fish slice or anything hard and flat. And that might cause my sister to say, ‘People aren’t either goodies or baddies, they can be a mixture of both.’

  And then, a week later, he might teach us how to make a decent cup of tea, which was not as easy as we’d imagined because you put the milk in after the teabag and not with it, which made it hard to judge the colour/strength. And how to make a decent Whisky Mac, which was exactly as easy as we’d imagined, using bottle lids (four parts ginger wine to one part whisky). And that might cause my sister to say, ‘He’s no good. He’s a chancer, a bad egg, and once an egg has turned it’s bad for ever, a leopard can’t change its spots.’