Man at the Helm

by Stibbe, Nina

  One particular bill from Miss Woods’s shop was ten times what our mother was expecting. And she did what people do when they get a bill of that kind: she asked for a breakdown. Seeing it itemized caused her to take an intake of breath so sharp it was like a skidding car.

  ‘Cold cuts,’ she said. ‘It’s pound after pound of cold cuts.’

  ‘What are “cold cuts”?’ I asked.

  My sister took the itemized bill from her and looked. Then she said, ‘What are cold cuts?’

  ‘Ham,’ said our mother. ‘Pound after pound of ham.’

  ‘And lots of this, look,’ my sister pointed. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Tobacco,’ said our mother. ‘I shan’t be angry, but have any of you been getting ham and tobacco from Miss Woods’s shop?’

  We said we definitely hadn’t. But she’d known it wasn’t us before she asked.

  ‘How can he have eaten so much ham?’ she wondered aloud.

  ‘He did like ham,’ said my sister.

  ‘But pounds and pounds of it?’ said our mother, shaking her head in dismay.

  We’d stopped having anything ham-like a long time ago after my sister spoke to a young woman who worked in the VG store and said that unless you can see what part of the body the meat is (e.g., leg or wing), then it’s probably all the stringy bits, nostrils and lips and so forth, all mushed up.

  But we’d hated the hams even before that. There were three types: the traditional ham leg, rolled in gingery breadcrumbs that looked like the ham from The Tale of Two Bad Mice. The haslet, tweedy-looking and unashamedly made from bits and bobs and lips and sinew, along with porridge oats. Finally, and worst of all, tongue – the whole tongue, from far back in the throat, deeper than the mouth, and that was truly grotesque. Miss Woods would heave these monster meats between the chiller cabinet and the slicer, holding them against her body like great fat babies.

  In addition to the usual reasons for hating the hams (the appearance, smell and death of the pig), I hated the influence they seemed to have over the people of the parish. Old ladies would walk from outlying hamlets to get the haslet, and old men would buy just one slice of something for a lonely lunch and walk back the very next day to get another. Housewives bought a selection for the whole family’s sandwiches for a week.

  Miss Woods’s shop was never ever empty. You never walked in and had to wait for her to come in from the back. She always had people queuing for the hams. She didn’t even boil or cure them herself. She got them from the same place that the Co-op and VG got theirs, from Gormond’s the catering butcher. But people still liked to queue for it and watch her wrestling with it and carving it.

  It irritated me that the ham was so popular when it was nothing special and that so much of it was on our bill when we hated it. My sister reminded our mother that she should seek advice from her accountant about the bills and so forth. My sister knew the parlance because we’d acted out an informative little play on the subject our mother was working on. I’d played our mother and our mother had played my father (albeit only telephone voiceover).

  Roderick: (on phone) You have shares made in your favour and you must manage them and live on the dividends.

  Adele: I’m not au fait with finance and investments, as you well know. You are torturing me.

  Roderick: You must manage your affairs.

  Adele: There seem to be no dividends forthcoming. I’m in dire straits.

  Roderick: You must see Mr Box, your accountant, and hopefully fiscal confidence might ensue.

  And then in a later scene my sister had played the accountant, Mr Box.

  Mr Box: Do you not read your statements of advice, Mrs Bird?

  Adele: I do, Mr Box, but I’m not always fully up to grasping the meaning.

  Mr Box: The spending of the money is easy, Mrs Bird, the understanding and managing of it are a requirement.

  And our mother, directing, had said, ‘Mr Box is much less jolly than that. Play him as a bit of a bully.’

  So we knew from the play that things were not only bad but that our mother was uncertain about the shares, afraid of the accountant and therefore uncertain as to the direness of the straits. None of it came as a shock. It was just a new thing to be thought about.

  And I did think about it and, just like Sherlock Holmes, a recollection came to me, very clearly, from the time that I’d searched in the Longlady house for Bufo the frog. I’d noticed a thing I hadn’t been looking for at the time, a seemingly unimportant detail, and filed it away in my mind for later.

  And it was this: I’d noticed that Mr Longlady had been working on a sideboard which was doubling as a desk – albeit a narrow, long one – in a hallway, his actual office having been given over to make a shower room for Mrs Longlady. Mr Longlady had been working from a battered old textbook called The DuPont Method of Business Accounting or Return on Investment the DuPont Way or something along those lines.

  I told my sister this recollection and suggested that we should add Mr Longlady to the list. Not intending that he should become the man at the helm, or have grown-up conversation or sex with our mother, but to help her understand and manage her finances via his accountancy training and get her out of the financial pickle that she was most definitely in. Especially as Mrs Longlady was going to be off the scene on the holiday of a lifetime seeing Boston in the fall.

  My sister reminded me that Mr Longlady had actually been on the list since the list began and for exactly such an occurrence. Which was very true when I thought about it, I just hadn’t noticed him – that’s how unnoticeable he was, even on the list in blue pen. Anyway, the letter went like this:

  Dear Mr Longlady,

  I would be exceedingly grateful if you could spare me a few minutes to discuss some shares I’ve had made over in my favour from my ex-husband in lieu of maintenance. I really need an accountant and would prefer one who has studied the DuPont method. Even if they don’t know that much about the DuPont, just a smattering of understanding would be impressive. Please call in for a drink and a snack one day, preferably tomorrow while my children are at school and your wife has gone on holiday.

  It is imperative that you don’t tell your wife. I suspect that your coming to my house would be seen as high treason – in spite of her offering your services when we first moved to this village.

  Yours sincerely etc.

  Then one day when three of the four Longladys were safely away seeing Boston and we were waiting to see if he’d call in, our mother came into the playroom looking perturbed and holding the letter we’d sent to Mr Longlady.

  ‘What’s that?’ my sister asked, knowing full well.

  ‘It’s a letter from me to Mr Longlady,’ said our mother.

  ‘What are you writing to him for?’ asked my sister.

  ‘I’m not. I have never written to Mr Longlady, but he just called to show me this. Someone has written to him purporting to be me,’ she said, and explained that someone, she couldn’t think who, had written to Mr Longlady, alluding to our private family matters.

  ‘What does it say?’ I asked.

  My sister read the letter with a tone and expression of puzzlement.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ my sister said.

  Our mother boiled up a pot of coffee and tried to work out who could have or would have written such a letter and why. She got an extra cup out for Mr Longlady, who was apparently due back any minute after feeding the bees.

  ‘It does sound quite like me,’ she said, meaning the letter, ‘but older and more formal.’

  Mr Longlady appeared at the door and they settled down to a cup of coffee.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said our mother. ‘I am so embarrassed and can’t think who’d do this.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Mr Longlady, ‘it’s just malicious lies.’

  ‘Well, the letter is quite right about the shares. And in fact it’s pretty much accurate in every way. I don’t know why but they seem to have dried up.’

  And then they starte
d discussing the situation.

  ‘I’m ashamed to say I’m hopeless on the whole money thing,’ said our mother.

  ‘It can be tricky,’ said Mr Longlady, sounding nothing like the bullying Mr Box. ‘If you like I’ll look at your paperwork and advise, if I can.’

  Mr Longlady was there all day and even had lunch with us and because, like every other man I’ve ever known, he was a huge fan of omelettes, we had omelettes with cheese and Ryvitas. And he read some paperwork and went home, taking more paperwork with him. He was back again the next day with his thoughts.

  There was never any question of his becoming the man at the helm. The accounts were too important for one thing, but also he had very clearly advertised a crop of mouth ulcers and a recent chesty cough during which he’d lived on Veno’s Lightning Cough Cure.

  Mr Longlady was most alarmed by the state of our mother’s financial affairs. There was no money whatsoever coming in from our mother’s shares, he said. He suggested she speak to my father urgently. Our mother explained that she didn’t like to ask for any more money, especially after the Eccles Topaz incident, which had been humiliating in the extreme. Mr Longlady said she must clarify the financial situation as a matter of urgency. He sat again at the kitchen table with his shirt sleeves up, reading more pieces of paper and tapping his finger on lines of numbers on the statements from the bank. And wondering where it had all gone. After a while he said, ‘Mrs Vogel, I think there are some documents you aren’t showing me.’

  And our mother admitted there were.

  ‘Everything points to the fact that you have mortgaged the house in order to pay some of your debts,’ he said.

  And she had. She broke down then and Mr Longlady was very kind and said she wasn’t to blame etc. The problem was this. Somehow our mother had very little actual money and had never actually had much, only shares from which money dribbled out and kept her going. Shares in this and that, she had sold; and shares in the other thing, she had sold; and shares in Vogel Machine Parts, she hadn’t been allowed to sell due to them being her divorce settlement in lieu of maintenance. The VMP shares, though, were in a part of the business that had barely chugged along for years and had never been up to much, and now that the other parts of the business were suffering in the recession and unable to help VMP, VMP was down and almost out.

  In spite of all her mixed experiences – in having a mother who disliked her and going to an unimaginative boarding school, getting expelled for being imaginative, being coaxed into marrying an iconoclast – our mother was unprepared for anything unusual happening and, like others of her class, it hadn’t occurred to her that anything untoward would or could happen. She’d mortgaged our house to help Charlie complete his bungalow shells and when the VMP money dried up our mother was suddenly, literally, without money.

  Mr Longlady came again on and off throughout the following week and went through files and files of papers and even spoke to the bank on our mother’s behalf and gave her options. He said one option was to remortgage and use the capital, and another option was to sell and buy a less expensive property. Our mother nodded. Then, suddenly, he had to go and collect his wife and children from the airport.

  She thanked him. She actually said he’d gone above and beyond and that she couldn’t thank him enough and gave him a tube of Bonjela that she’d picked up while getting her prescription made up. After he’d gone our mother sat for a moment with her head dramatically in her hands.

  ‘Are you going to remortgage?’ I asked, really to remind her of the key part of Mr Longlady’s advice.

  ‘I’ve already done that,’ she said, ‘I just didn’t show him that paperwork. I think we’ll have to sell up, which is pretty much the same thing, except you have to move out.’

  In the middle of the Mr Longlady accounts episode, everyone got into a tizz when Little Jack’s claim that he couldn’t hear with his eyes shut became a proper worry. It was something he’d been claiming for some time. For instance, when our mother read to us from The Hobbit my sister and I would doze off, lulled by her boozy slurring voice (even she was lulled by it), but Little Jack would sit staring at her as she read.

  ‘Snuggle down,’ she’d say, ‘close your eyes and imagine.’

  And he’d say, ‘But I can’t hear with my eyes shut.’

  So when there was a minor little fire in the omelette pan one day and Mr Longlady witnessed it and shouted that we should all evacuate the house as a precaution, we called and called and Little Jack just lay on the settee rotating one foot, most definitely awake but unhearing, and Mr Longlady – who was wrestling with a tiny fire extinguisher – said, ‘Is he deaf?’

  And eventually my sister threw a beaker of water through the hatch and he leapt up.

  ‘I couldn’t hear you,’ he said with a stammer, ‘I had my eyes closed.’

  And when our mother was in Diggory’s Kitchen Cave the following week, replacing the egg pan and looking at pretty glassware that she suddenly couldn’t afford to buy (clear goblets with coloured stems), the new seriousness of Jack’s claims suddenly dawned and we dashed out of Diggory’s to consult Dr Kaufmann by phone (as it turned out).

  We drove home with my sister doing hearing experiments on Little Jack and trying to catch him out. The thing was, though, with Jack you had to admit it seemed as though he was always right. And, more importantly, he didn’t make stuff up.

  We weren’t going to be allowed to come to Dr Kaufmann’s for this unusual consultation unless we swore to be quiet and good, because laboratory conditions might be needed in order to test him. In the end, though, we were only there a minute as Dr Kaufmann simply referred Jack for a hearing test at Leicester Royal Infirmary. He actually telephoned the unit and got an appointment there and then for the following week.

  When Melody Longlady came back to school after the USA trip, she’d prepared a little talk for the class entitled ‘My Trip to the USA’. She hadn’t prepared the talk in order to show off, but because Mrs Clarke had said she must after having a fortnight off school gadding about in America while the rest of us had ‘done test after test and endured the mundane’. Mrs Clarke was our teacher for the new school year and she was as lovely as Miss Thorne had been mean. Full of enthusiasm, but a stickler for hard work too.

  I was glad to have Melody back, us being secret friends and her being very handy for the walk home. And the whole class was agog to hear the USA talk. Not because we were that interested in someone else’s dream holiday, but it was always interesting when some poor person had to stand in front of the class and give a talk and you felt that mix of intense sympathy and fascination.

  When it came to giving the talk, Melody was quite shy and just read out a stream of things that none of us could take in, or even hear properly, about Boston and New York being on the east coast of the United States of America and having such and such population. At the end, Mrs Clarke thanked Melody for the factual account and suggested we follow on with a question-and-answer session in order to get a more personal response. It was clever and thoughtful of Mrs Clarke to suggest the Q&A because it suited Melody and she really got into her stride and told us some interesting things.

  I can still remember the first question and answer because it made such an impact on me.

  Mrs Clarke: So, Melody, what most impressed you about America?

  Melody: The friendliness of the American people.

  Melody expanded on this theme and told the class that at the start of the trip the Longlady family had felt rather anxious about all the smiling and friendliness and people saying hello to them and asking how they were doing. Unused to such warmth, for the first few days they really hadn’t known what to make of it, and had worried more than once that someone was about to shoot them dead.

  There had only been one person on the entire trip who’d acted disgruntled and that had been a small man who’d said a nasty thing about Northern Ireland and Melody’s mother had come back at him with Vietnam and then they’d had to hurry
along to avoid a deterioration. They soon got used to the immense kindness and niceness and started to enjoy it and then, arriving back in Britain, they’d found everyone utterly cold and rude by comparison.

  ‘Has anyone else got a question for Melody about America?’ asked Mrs Clarke.

  I put my hand up.

  ‘Yes, Lizzie.’

  ‘Was the food nice?’ I asked.

  Melody seemed thrilled that I’d asked that and launched into a list of amazing food experiences they had had. Starting with Day One, when they’d arrived at the hotel and been exhausted – or to use the American, ‘pooped’ – but not particularly hungry, and decided to ring down for room service rather than go out for a proper dinner. They ordered beef sandwiches and tea to have in front of Abbott and Costello, which was on permanently.

  They’d been expecting a few dry triangles with a dish of mustard and maybe some lettuce. But what arrived was half a cow’s worth (each) of succulent roast beef slices, a basket of salted crisps, exotic leaves, tiny tomatoes, avocado slices and melted cheese, all on a silver tray with a variety of mayonnaises and mustards. And the tea wasn’t just a simple cup of tea, but pint glasses of a sweet orange liquid over crushed ice, mint leaves and lemon slices. The description reminded me of our mother’s pre-split dinners.

  The class gasped at the idea of half a cow each and Melody continued with further tales of American food items being bigger and nicer than they expected.

  I walked home with Melody after school. I asked (out of politeness) after the dying aunt they’d visited in Boston – whether she’d died or was still hanging on – and it turned out they’d not seen the aunt because she’d gone on a water-colour painting course that coincided with their trip.