Man at the Helm

by Stibbe, Nina

  Charlie left by the fire exit. Mr Lomax wiped his face and neck with a J-cloth and followed.

  We watched as the fire door clanged shut and ran on tiptoe to the door, peeped out and saw Charlie limp out across the pointless lawn. Our mother stood there beside the car. I couldn’t see much and the buffeting wind made it difficult to read the body language. But I saw the hand-over-mouth gesture of horror and I saw her scrabbling in her bag for the money.

  My sister picked up a broken umbrella from the warehouse floor and was suddenly running towards them. I tried to follow, but the door swung back and knocked me to my knees. Looking up I saw our mother cradling Charlie and suddenly my sister lashing out at him with the skeletal brolly. Our mother screamed and danced Charlie out of reach, but my sister jumped on his back. Our mother grabbed my sister from behind, but she kicked out hard and caught him on the side of the head and Charlie limped away into the dark like an injured animal.

  Our mother tried to run after him but my sister caught her and held her. The two of them were crying like something out of a police drama, their wind-blown hair all tangled together.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ I said, but the wind caught my words and no one heard.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ I tried again, and they still stood there. ‘Get into the car, we need to get home,’ I screamed, and I must’ve sounded authoritative then because we all got in and our mother started the engine. Little Jack was lying across the back seat, asleep, and I had to shove him along.

  ‘Can you drive?’ I asked our mother.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She wiped her face with her sleeve and drove us carefully home.

  At home Jack went to bed early with hot chocolate and my sister asked our mother twice if she’d like us to ring Dr Kaufmann. And after a while my sister asked again and then just rang Dr Kaufmann. He arrived and spoke to our mother for seventeen minutes and then left. On the way out he spoke to my sister and me.

  ‘It’s very hard when people don’t behave well, especially when it’s people we trust,’ he said. ‘Be very nice to her.’ And we agreed we would.

  The thing was, though, I wasn’t (very nice to her). I felt cross and disgusted and that she was nothing but an idiot. So I just ignored her and took money from her purse in the fruit bowl and hung around outside eating sweets. If it rained, I did piano practice to drown everything out. After a day or two, I felt guilty and sorry and back to normal.

  I went and plonked myself down on the sofa in her sitting room. She was sitting on the floor reading papers, ghostly with white, dry lips and looking as if she’d been in the bath too long or had died.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘You shouldn’t be sorry, Lizzie,’ she said, and touched my head.

  And then because I was back to normal it was my sister’s turn to be nasty and she stayed away and tutted at everything our mother said and took money from her purse etc., but just for one day, luckily. Then, when she’d got over her unkindness, the three of us had a family-size packet of KP nuts and talked things over.

  Although she looked like someone out of a horror film, our mother seemed quite calm and sensible. ‘Well, I’ve completely messed everything up,’ she said, ‘and I’ve been stupid and blind … and now we have to think about the future.’

  It occurred to me at that point, and not before, that she was about to say, ‘And I’m very sorry but you will have to be made wards of court.’ My sister looked stricken and I took that to mean she thought the same as me.

  But she didn’t, she was only worried about the ponies. ‘Well, we can’t keep four of them,’ our mother said, ‘we’ve got no money.’

  My sister put her face in her hands and, however sad it was for her, I realized then that everything was going to be all right. We’d got no money. That was all. It was the norm – everyone had no money. That was the point, wasn’t it? We’d had money when no one else had. Now we were going to be like everyone else. Or even more so, one of the underdogs. That was how I saw it and it was like a weight lifting.

  My sister wanted to know if our mother might get the police on to Charlie for cheating her. Our mother said that Charlie hadn’t committed any crime in law, only one of the heart, and the heart didn’t count for much in the law unless it was murder.

  ‘I could murder him,’ said my sister.

  We had a tea break and then moved on to more practical things, and our mother said she would do her best to sort things out and my sister wondered whether our father might be able to help.

  ‘No, he can’t help,’ said our mother, and then she couldn’t really talk any more, she just wanted to get drunk and go to bed.

  ‘Why don’t you write a play?’ my sister asked.

  ‘I need to think about getting the house ready to sell,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow I’ll give Mr Lomax a ring and get him in to fix the banister.’

  My sister and I left the room.

  ‘Does she know about Lomax?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I didn’t tell her,’ said my sister.

  ‘Should we tell her?’ I asked.

  ‘No, definitely not. We should let her ask him to come and fix the banister,’ said my very clever sister, ‘and see what happens.’

  Mr Lomax came and fixed the banister. He turned up the next day and did a marvellous job and had a little go at other things too and when our mother asked for the bill, he said not to worry, she could pay him another time.

  And after he’d gone we admired the fixed banister and the way he’d smoothed the dents in the parquet flooring and the lovely job he’d done on the slate floor.

  ‘What a lovely fellow,’ said our mother and, feeling better about mankind, went and wrote some of her play.

  Later that evening we had the misery of acting it out. It was the trickiest bit of drama we’d ever attempted and quite draining. My sister insisted on playing herself (her being quite brave and heroic and saving us a couple of hundred quid, if not more) and because our mother was playing Charlie, the two of them had to choreograph a brutal stage fight – the result being Charlie dies from a bruise on the brain. It took ages to get the final kick right because my sister couldn’t get her leg high enough to reach his ‘greying temple’ and in the end they had to turn it into a punch. Also, our mother kept changing Charlie’s deathbed speech from ‘I’m sorry, Elizabeth’ to ‘I do love you, it’s just that I’m a rogue.’

  I was playing our mother (as usual) and I swear to God I saw the whole vile situation clearly for the first time. Even though I’d lived right through it. That’s how brilliant she was at writing plays.

  At some point, soon after the Charlie fight, Mr Gummo had been clearing up the wind-blown garden and our mother had gone out to offer him a cup of coffee and he’d said what he always said, ‘No, thank you, Mrs V, I’m happy with my flask.’

  Our mother took her mug out anyway and told Mr Gummo she was going to have to let him go. He had to sit down on the garden bench and seemed to be blinking back tears. Our mother explained it was beyond her control – money was tight and due to be a lot tighter. Mr Gummo had of course heard rumours. The subject of the rumours he’d heard concerning our mother had only ever been about the financial situation within the business, and not about s-e-x as we’d assumed. Our mother poured her heart out to him and told him how stupid she’d been and that she should apologize to everyone for the mess she’d created.

  ‘I should apologize to his wife,’ she said.

  ‘Wife?’ said Mr Gummo. ‘Charles Bates isn’t married.’

  ‘He is,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Gummo, assuredly, ‘really, he’s not a married man.’

  ‘But Lilian?’ said our mother.

  ‘Oh, Lilian,’ said Mr Gummo, with a sniff. ‘Lilian’s his mother.’

  After a brief pause our mother took it well, she even laughed. Mr Gummo didn’t see the funny side, though, and he stayed solemn.

  ‘What a world we live in, Mrs V,’ he said. ‘Thank God for fauna and fl
ora.’ And they sipped their coffee.

  He’d got all sorts of things coming up out of the ground over the coming months that he’d be very sad not to see, he said, in particular some alliums and Mexican daisies, whose seeds he’d collected from a wall and sown the spring before. That was the thing about gardening, the garden isn’t about today but about tomorrow (his words), and he wondered if he might come and see how things were doing from time to time.

  Our mother said of course he might and that she’d recommend him wholeheartedly to the new people. Hearing that she was planning to sell the house, Mr Gummo wondered if he might just keep the garden looking its best while she tried to sell the house and be in situ when the new owners took possession.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ said our mother, ‘you mean as a sitting tenant, as it were?’

  And they agreed that he’d keep the beds ticking over and the lawns nice, and tidy the laid hedge etc. and very much exist in the eyes of any buyer.

  Part III

  A WHOLESOME ENDEAVOUR

  23

  The Man List was looking very sparse when suddenly two new doctors came to the village. It wasn’t that Dr Kaufmann was leaving, just that the village had trebled its population due to two housing estates being tacked on and joining up with various little hamlets that had been quite remote before. The village therefore needed more doctors to look after all the extra sick people and their sick children.

  My sister and I got the news about these two new doctors from Mrs C. Beard, who told us that one of the doctors was quite handsome and almost divorced and the other was going to be a lady and probably best avoided unless you had a lady’s problem. My sister and I focused on Dr Norman (the man doctor).

  ‘A man, divorced, experienced, and a doctor!’ I whispered, as we walked away from Mrs C. Beard.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said my sister, resenting him, in her usual irrational way, for suddenly appearing in the village and not being on the list.

  By accident of fate we were the first people in the whole village to meet the new man doctor in his professional capacity, which gave us a head start on anyone else looking for a husband. We’d gone to see Dr Kaufmann with an annoying cut on Little Jack’s elbow, only to discover that Dr Kaufmann had had to dash off to a severed finger and the new doctor – who was just literally moving that day into a temporary dwelling – had rushed over to the surgery to cover.

  Dr Norman cannot have heard how awful and irresponsible our family was because he was extremely nice and not at all suspicious. Unless, like Dr Kaufmann, he’d decided to ignore our bad reputation and be nice to us in spite of it. Anyway, seeing how new and nice he was, my sister gave me a nod and a look, which I took to mean he’d gone onto the list (mentally), and because Jack was being very brave about the cut we were able to chat as if nothing was happening.

  So, as Dr Norman affixed the stick-on stitches, I jumped straight in.

  ‘Have you got any children?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘one son, aged nine.’

  ‘Do you ever see him?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, every other weekend – in fact he’s staying with me this weekend.’

  There was a small pause and my sister’s eyebrows went up.

  ‘Do you want to bring him to our house to see the ponies?’ she said.

  ‘And our tree house,’ I said, thinking any normal nine-year-old might prefer a tree house.

  ‘And my Romans,’ said Little Jack.

  Dr Norman smiled and said, ‘Well, that’s a very kind offer, I might well do that … if Mum has no objections.’

  He looked at our mother and she said, ‘That would be splendid.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ I asked, meaning the nine-year-old son.

  ‘Well, I call him Tuppence,’ said the doctor, with a little chuckle.

  We strolled home, Jack in a bandage, and all had our say about Tuppence’s name.

  ‘Tuppence?’ said my sister. ‘What a name!’

  ‘It’s just a pet name. His father probably came up with it,’ said our mother, being fair.

  ‘Yeah, like Shrimp, Litlun and Freckles,’ I said, naming the three cute American brothers in my story.

  ‘But it seems such a pitiful amount,’ said my sister, ‘financially speaking – I mean, tuppence? – that’s 2p.’

  ‘No,’ said Little Jack, ‘tuppence is less than 1 new p.’

  ‘Oh yeah, OK, well, what can you actually get with less than 1p?’ said my sister. And my two siblings sounded all cynical and critical and seemed to have been infected by the village – wanting to attack a newcomer for something as innocent as a nickname.

  Dr Norman was living in one of the newly built chalet-bungalows behind Dr Kaufmann’s that were actually designed for old people and had a rail along the garden path and nothing to trip up on. He’d rented number 10, but it hadn’t been quite ready, so he was in number 16, which was really meant for a lady (who wasn’t quite ready herself).

  Mrs C. Beard heard we’d seen Dr Norman and came across the road and gave us extra information that she’d gleaned. One, that Dr Norman had had to leave his ex-marital home in a something of a hurry after he and his wife had started being unreasonable with each other. Plus he needed to be on-call to fulfil the obligations of the new post. Also, that he had a girlfriend who had previously been a patient, or maybe a nurse – either way, it had a whiff of not being entirely above board. And two, that the lady doctor was helpfully called Dr Gurly.

  That afternoon my sister wrote to Dr Norman.

  Dear Dr Norman,

  Please come round for a cup of coffee or tea (or whatever you prefer) so that we can welcome you to the village properly. Feel free to bring your nine-year-old.

  Yours truly etc.

  I objected to the letter, saying he was probably already coming round on Saturday with the nine-year-old.

  ‘He’ll cancel Saturday,’ she said. ‘He had no intention of coming and was very careful not to commit.’

  I corrected her. ‘No, he said he was coming.’

  My sister corrected me. ‘He said, “I might well do that,” which means he probably won’t.’ As well as being philosophical, she’d also become quite analytical and kept noticing what people said and was getting more like our mother every day in her understanding of what they actually meant. In fact, since being at secondary school, my sister had started thinking about things in a very inconvenient way and had stopped believing anything anyone ever said, unless they were crystal-clear and didn’t touch their face when they said it.

  There had been some talk of enrolling her at a better school than Flatstone school, but this better one was in town and private and our mother was anti all that and, in the end, our father wasn’t all that bothered.

  Dr Norman did cancel on Saturday, or rather he just didn’t come, which was what my sister had expected. And we decided to give it a few weeks and then send an invitation involving the nine-year-old. However, the new letter was not needed, because soon after that first meeting with Dr Norman he became our lodger for six weeks while he waited for his chalet to become ready. This came about as a result of Dr Kaufmann’s suggesting it.

  Our mother was glad of the prospect of cash for dinner money and cigarettes (it had come to that), but at the same time she was anxious about the reality of it in the week prior to his moving in. She asked us to get the house in a fit state for a lodging doctor while she jostled with the play and her accounts. She said cleanliness was probably important.

  My sister went round with the hoover on an extension lead and did such a good job that the bag filled up twice with dog hair and other bits. I did the kitchen, including the cutlery drawer which had become chaotic and full of things that shouldn’t have been in there, such as bits of macaroni, feathers and horse stuff. Little Jack got the doctor’s quarters tidy and made a display of Subbuteo players along the tallboy in the bedroom. Later, I donated my bedside lamp and we made his bathroom pretty with a potted spider plant which had so many babies d
angling, it was like a variegated shooting star. Plus a bar of Knight’s Castile and some Radox bath salts in case he liked having a soak after a hard day’s work.

  The evening Dr Norman arrived we invited him to dinner as a welcome gesture, even though it wasn’t part of the deal. The deal was bedroom, bathroom, use of the playroom telly, the garden, washing machine and one shelf in the fridge. The welcome dinner was macaroni cheese and a mixed salad of radish and cucumber with a French dressing. The French dressing was 90 per cent vinegar due to a mix-up and the salad had become pickled, but it seemed deliberate and didn’t matter because the macaroni went down well. We’d consulted My Learn to Cook Book for a nice dish but didn’t have time to do anything from scratch, only poached eggs, and felt they wouldn’t quite do. We used a packet sauce but added extra cheese to make it cheesy, and you’d never have known.

  Seeing the table set for four, Dr Norman thought we’d forgotten about the welcome dinner, so we explained that our mother didn’t have dinners. It was thoughtless of us to say that, knowing that doctors are generally keen on people eating, but it just came out and unfortunately he questioned her.

  ‘What’s this about mothers not having dinners?’ he said.

  ‘What’s this about lodgers poking their noses in?’ she asked back.

  And that made it a bad start and I’m not sure he felt very welcome, and he went upstairs as soon as he could.

  The following Saturday Dr Norman went out in the morning and brought Tuppence back to the house. Tuppence was small for his age and seemed younger than his nine years and was loaded with sherbet pips.

  ‘Hello, Tuppence,’ I called to him, and he looked furious.

  ‘Say hello,’ said Dr Norman to Tuppence, and he introduced us all by name.

  ‘I’m not Tuppence!’ said Tuppence. ‘I’m Thruppenny now.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve gone up a penny,’ said my sister, and Dr Norman patted Tuppence on the head.

  ‘Yes, he’s gone up a penny, haven’t you, Thruppenny?’