Man at the Helm

by Stibbe, Nina

  Later I said to our mother, ‘Isn’t she the bitter end?’ which was the kind of thing she’d say, having been brought up in the 1950s.

  Our mother nodded. I wanted more, though.

  ‘I hate her, don’t you, Mum?’ I said.

  ‘No. I don’t hate her,’ she said, ‘but she is the bitter end.’

  16

  While we waited for Mr Oliphant to come good, I’m afraid to say a dispute arose regarding control of the Man List. I’d always known my sister was pretty much the boss, but I thought there was an understanding that we both had to agree before any man was added.

  Mr Nesbit was an oldish man with a full beard who had apparently once lived in a section of our house. He often sat on the street bench almost opposite, sucking Nuttall’s Mintoes, shouting out about the Suez Canal and inviting children to knock on his wooden leg.

  Looking at the Man List one day, I was surprised to see Mr Nesbit’s name had been added without prior discussion, albeit with a question mark. I knew only too well that men were a bit thin on the ground in the village and our mother was in need of cheering up after the disastrous attempt to re-engage with the wider family, but I was 100 per cent anti-Mr Nesbit. It was a notion too ludicrous to even discuss, but his name was there in blue pen so I had to.

  ‘Why have you added Mr Nesbit to the list?’ I asked, hoping it might be a different Mr Nesbit, a doctor in the next village or something.

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  ‘You mean to say it actually is the Mr Nesbit?’ I said. ‘He’s virtually a tramp.’

  ‘He’s a war veteran, Lizzie,’ said my sister.

  ‘He’s got mental problems,’ I said.

  ‘He’s been through some trying times,’ said my sister.

  ‘Mum would never cope with the wooden leg,’ I said.

  ‘She’d bloody well have to get used to it,’ said my sister, sounding very cross.

  ‘It would be a disaster,’ I said.

  ‘We said we wouldn’t rule anyone out,’ my sister reminded me.

  ‘I’m ruling Mr Nesbit out,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’m saying give him a chance,’ said my sister.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘he’s temperamentally unsuitable for the helm.’

  I felt uncharitable but very sensible. We couldn’t have someone on the list who habitually shouted, ‘Get off and milk it,’ as we rode past him on our ponies. Plus, how could we work together if she could act in that unilateral manner? Not that I would have used those words at that time. Obviously.

  ‘How would you like it if I added someone without your say-so?’ I said.

  ‘You can add whoever you like,’ she said.

  So I did. I added an equally undesirable man to the list – someone I knew my sister would never want at the helm. Someone on a par with Mr Nesbit.

  Mr Terry the butcher was one of those cheerful, involved-in-the-village types who collected money for the Xmas decoration committee and donated pieces of meat and premium sausages to the Summer Garden Party.

  ‘You’ve added Mr Terry to the list,’ said my sister.

  ‘Yeah, I know, he’s nice. He’s a redhead. Mum loves a redhead,’ I said.

  ‘He’s a butcher, Lizzie,’ said my sister.

  ‘Is that bad?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ said my sister.

  ‘You can’t rule him out just because you’re a vegetarian,’ I said. ‘He’s a redhead.’

  ‘Mum’s a vegetarian,’ said my sister, clutching at straws.

  ‘No, she’s not,’ I said.

  ‘How do you know?’ she said.

  ‘I saw her eat a chicken’s leg on New Year’s Eve,’ I said.

  ‘She was drunk and had forgotten about being a vegetarian,’ she said.

  In the end we agreed to delete both Mr Terry and Mr Nesbit.

  I wouldn’t really have wanted Mr Terry the butcher either. Not with our squeamish mother and all those bloody aprons, but I’d rather him than Mr Nesbit and his slogan-shouting and the leg propped up outside the bathroom door.

  The pills our mother got from Dr Kaufmann and Dr Gilbey of Devonshire Place were a help, but the truth was that she remained basically unhappy without anyone grown-up in her life to have chats or sex with. I suggested she make friends with Mrs C. Beard across the road – for chats. But she wasn’t keen, probably because Mrs C. Beard seemed preoccupied with all the wrong things, such as the one-way system in the village and how increased road speeds might affect the duck pond. My sister suggested we buy a new yearling to ‘school on’, but our mother had had enough of ponies. I think she’d been put off by Robbie, our Shetland gelding, with all his minor ailments and his major one.

  I felt let down by the pills: they’d not made enough tangible difference, only causing a hiatus in the laundry resulting in irreparable damage to most of our clothing. So I took the brave step of going to see Dr Kaufmann on my own. I felt we were grown-up enough to seek proper advice and stop groping around in the dark, and made an appointment in the correct manner – on the phone – and when the receptionist asked for a brief description of my ailment I said, ‘It’s personal,’ and the receptionist said, ‘I’ll make a note to that effect.’ So I said, ‘It’s not an ailment, but a worry.’ And the receptionist said, ‘Say no more, dear.’ And sounded a bit like Dick Emery.

  I could tell Dr Kaufmann was uncomfortable when I stepped into the surgery alone because he ran to the door and called his wife to come in. She rushed in and offered me two Smarties, which I thought odd – her being a doctor’s wife and Smarties looking like pills. I refused them, just in case they were pills. Dr and Mrs Kaufmann obviously knew about things at our house and looked at me with knitted brows.

  I explained that our mother was lonely due to having no moral support and asked him and his wife what we should do for the best. I was careful to look at them both in turn as I spoke, because our mother had taught us always to look at everyone in the group when speaking and never just the man, which one is prone to do.

  Dr Kaufmann asked me why now, particularly, I had come for advice. I explained that my sister and I were a bit worried about being made wards of court. He said things really weren’t that bad. We shouldn’t worry about abstract things, he said, but try to help with the everyday.

  ‘Such as what?’ I asked.

  ‘Such as making sure the whole family eats a meal every day,’ he said.

  And he seemed to think this – the meal thing – was the key.

  Dr and Mrs Kaufmann were exceedingly nice and helpful and made me feel so much better. They made me realize that our mother wasn’t the only adult who had pills and loneliness. And that sometimes even families with a man at the helm had problems. I could have cried with relief.

  I didn’t say a word about the extra pills we were getting from Dr Gilbey of Devonshire Place. I was tempted momentarily, knowing how cross Dr Kaufmann would be, not with our mother who was, after all, just a person on medication due to circumstances, but with Dr Gilbey, who was supposed to be a trained doctor with huge responsibilities. I imagined Dr Kaufmann getting the train with us to London and having it out with Dr Gilbey, swiping the tumblers of orange squash and little biscuits off the tray and scattering pills on to the floor as a symbol of his anger and calling Dr Gilbey a disgrace, which is about the worst thing one man can say to another without swearing. I couldn’t imagine Dr Kaufmann swearing.

  I came away from the doctor’s feeling much less worried and reported the recommendations to my sister and we decided between us we should begin a cookery spree – an idea proposed by me ages ago (if you recall) – and I took the moral high ground.

  ‘I warned you about the underweight thing months ago,’ I reminded my sister, ‘and all you wanted to do was buy more foals.’

  My sister was hurt by this and reminded me that it had taken her months to get me to care one iota about our poor abandoned mother and her state of mind.

  So we truced, let bygones be bygones and stra
ight away selected a few cookbooks to look at for ideas. We settled on My Learn to Cook Book by Ursula Sedgwick because it contained very attractive illustrations of eggs, pies and simple meals and offered clear and detailed guidance via a friendly cat and dog character. The recipes seemed very achievable as opposed to those in the other books, which appeared almost to be written in a foreign language plus had photographs, which were always off-putting as opposed to Ursula Sedgwick’s jolly illustrations.

  We made Quick Lorraine, which was basically egg and bacon pie except with the addition of grated Cheddar and ground-up peppercorns. The shortcrust pastry was the most difficult part, as it always is, but, using My Learn to Cook Book, it turned out great. Then, at tea, eating the Quick Lorraine, we got our mother reminiscing about her cooking glory days. And interwoven was the story of her marriage and its breakdown. Which was news to us.

  She told us that, in the early years, she and our father had been a pair of trendy iconoclasts – eating one day at Cranks vegetarian restaurant in Carnaby Street with two baby girls in tow (my sister and me) and the next day, on a whim, they’d leave us with Jane the nice nanny and dine at the Savoy – where his parents kept a suite – and order room service omelettes with vodka and not even bother to eat them but rush out to a show at the last minute and have ice cream. They were free of convention in those days and our mother had loved that. Midway through the 1960s, however, my father was suddenly called back to Leicestershire to take over the family business. It was fair enough: he was in his mid-thirties and it was about time he did a day’s work.

  My father was impressively able to snap back into the man he was required to be, but our mother struggled. There was something wrong with her. She says it boiled down to the fact that she was so young, only twenty-something, and hadn’t ever wanted or needed to be serious and proper, but I suspect it was more that she didn’t like the man my father had snapped back into – the true, proper, educated him. To be fair, she’d fallen in love with and married the other version – a person who didn’t really exist and had been going through a phase. And that must’ve been a bit daunting.

  It was scary to think you could accidentally marry someone who was in a phase.

  Our mother did her best to support him as a wife, and did OK up to a point, on the entertaining side of things with her cookery skills – the foundations of which she’d learned at her boarding school, where they taught girls everything they needed to know in order to be a good wife to a successful man (plus Latin and maths). And then honed the skills at home with Gwen, the family’s inventive cook, who was interested in Italian and French foods – a rare thing at the time. Unless in Italy or France.

  The dinners our mother produced during those years – between the iconoclastic years and the divorce and before she and he stopped liking each other – were as beautiful to look at as they were delicious to eat, and this was much appreciated by the many business guests our father had to entertain – especially the Americans, who were way ahead of the British in the ways of food apparently.

  Our mother’s meals often had a clever theme. It was something Gwen the inventive cook had taught her – make the food look interesting and your husband (or guest) will find you enigmatic beyond the plate. And that reminded me of a thing our sports teacher used to say about starting one goal ahead if you and your teammates all have your hair in medium-height ponytails (as opposed to different heights/styles).

  Our mother made sure that the meals she served were fascinating. For instance, a flourish of multicoloured steamed matchstick vegetables arranged as a rainbow above a hunk of grilled flesh was called Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain. I could picture it in my mind. Other dishes I could picture were the Tropical Aquarium – tiny savoury shapes in aspic, depicting fish with spinach seaweed. And Picture-frame Pie – which looked, from a distance, like a Cézanne – set with apricot gelatine in ornate pastry, sculpted to resemble the carved wood of a frame. Last one: inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a fruit and nut platter depicting an old man’s swollen face with apple cheeks, a dappled yellow conference pear for his drunkard’s nose and half-open Brazil nuts for eyes.

  Her ramblings were quite interesting, but more importantly, they offered a perfect run-up to our suggestion for a cookery spree and, as soon as she stopped rambling, we begged her to cook for us and she was quite touched.

  ‘Cook something for us,’ we begged.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ she said coyly, ‘I’ve lost my confidence, food-wise.’

  ‘We beg you,’ we said.

  ‘Don’t beg,’ she said.

  ‘It’s only us, Mum. It won’t matter what happens. We’re not even grown-ups,’ said my clever sister, ‘and no one will know.’

  All that chatting and begging led to the risotto a couple of days later.

  As our mother began to prepare her ingredients and equipment, my sister went out to groom her pony and teach him to count to three with his hoof, Little Jack read his book about Romans killing people and themselves, and I was left to supervise the risotto, which annoyed me. I was not interested in cookery per se and especially not in watching someone else cook special rice. Plus I hated being on my own with a parent (still do) and I didn’t know what to say – whether to encourage, enquire or ignore, having had no experience of cooking or spectating it, except for the Quick Lorraine.

  I must say, it was amusing, though, seeing our mother at the stove all aproned up and with a low ponytail. She really looked the part, which was odd in itself as I’d never before seen her looking the part – any part – except on a sun-lounger. She had her utensils laid out and the special rice ready beforehand, which seemed a good start, but no recipe book; the recipe was in her head, which seemed bad. She put oil and butter into a pan, added a whole lot of chopped onions and let them cook down while she boiled up some coffee. She then tipped the rice into the onions. It was going well and the comforting aroma of the sweating onions soon began to swirl around and, with it, a feeling of well-being.

  She must have got bored then because she suddenly left the cooking area and started writing in her notebook at the kitchen table and swigging the coffee. It was a big kitchen, the table and cooker being at opposite ends. I went over for a peep at the notebook, hoping to see a recipe, but saw what looked like the beginning of a play.

  Adele: I thought macédoine.

  Roderick: (irritable) I asked for julienne.

  Adele: But you know I’m afraid of the mandoline after what happened.

  Roderick: But it achieves uniform thickness.

  Spotting that, I knew my place was back by the rice and onions – which were now whining softly in the pan and begging to be stirred. I didn’t, though (stir). I knew, even at that young age, you don’t stir someone else’s pan, however desperate the situation. And that people who do are outrageous interferers and have no respect for the person whose pan it actually is. Gwen had taught our mother this years ago and then, when my sister unthinkingly stirred a pan of grated potato that was meant to be staying in one piece, our mother explained the rule to us.

  I became a bit alarmed about the rice and onions – it looked as though it might be starting to burn. The onions and oil had gone to nothing and it was left to the rice to take the heat. The whole thing had taken a turn for the worse and a new sound was emitting from the pan, an agonized hiss, and the anxious smell of hot metal obliterated the comforting aroma of sweating onions. I decided I must speak out, and though I knew my interference would have an adverse effect on the project (and would make our mother hate me), I had to try to save the risotto. I guess this is the worrier’s dilemma. Speak out and be despised, or live with devastation.

  ‘Can rice burn?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not really,’ she said, without looking up from her notebook.

  I struggled on. ‘Are you sure?’ I said, in a dreadful high voice.

  ‘About what?’ she said, looking up now, annoyed.

  ‘… that rice can’t burn,’ I said, and she sprang up a
nd crossed the smoky room.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me it was burning?’ she said.

  ‘I did,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus!’ she said, and flung the pan into the sink. The kitchen filled with hissing steam and it was as though Stephenson’s derailed Rocket had burst through the wall. The others appeared and asked what had happened and my sister looked at me, blamingly.

  ‘You didn’t stir her pan, did you?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘I’m not stupid.’

  That was the end of the risotto. But happily it didn’t put her off altogether and it wasn’t long before she dragged out a huge, rather stained earthenware pot (given to her by Mrs Vanderbus, who no longer needed the capacity) and cooked a casserole of frozen chicken wings. The result was a soup of fingery bones and soft carrots in a soupy liquid – but quite nice and a success in terms of filling the house with the comforting aroma of stewing onions and not burning.

  And she carried on for a while with low-maintenance dishes, mainly stews in the earthenware pot and sometimes roasted fruits with demerara sugar and custard, and I just wished that one day Dr Kaufmann would peer in through the window and see the scenes of meal production and note how sensibly I’d taken his advice. Sadly, I have to admit that our mother didn’t actually eat much of the food herself – just picking at it while she cooked – carrot coins and the odd spoonful here and there. The point was, though, that she was buying and cooking food and that was very good for the campaign to keep us out of the Crescent Homes.

  17

  Charlie Bates’s non-appearance all this time should have been a relief to my sister and me, but after a while it wasn’t. We could have done with him. We actually missed him and the way he made our mother feel.