by Nina Stibbe
It wasn’t my style to linger, try to get into a conversation or angle for a lift or in any way do anything treacherous or flirty. But I can’t deny I did look at Mike Yu too often and for too long and hard and full in the eyes and I knew he knew. I thought he looked at me a bit too hard as well. Although it’s always difficult when you think someone’s staring at you and makes you stare at them and then they think you started it, or they might think that. Ditto with people in general. So I was going to try this weepy look the next time I saw him, and I knew exactly what time he pulled up into the drive every day to collect Miranda in his Datsun. I might find an excuse to wander out into the courtyard and go, ‘Oh, hi, Mike, how are you?’ and look as if I was on the brink of tears and look at his face while he answered something like, ‘Hi, Lizzie, how are you?’
Miranda and Lady Briggs had an altercation. Lady Briggs had become quite outspoken since coming downstairs and she’d told Miranda, again, that she actually wasn’t in love with Mike Yu and wasn’t in love with anyone—she could tell by her eyes (like everyone else, she was obsessed with a person’s eyes). Miranda had been annoyed by Lady Briggs poking her nose in and called her a gormless old idiot.
Later, Miranda told me the reason she’d been so upset by it was that it was true. She had cooled off towards Mike Yu and found herself pulling away from his barely-there kisses and not finding his hand-holding and finger-squeezing so erotic, or erotic at all, and it was just fucking weird.
‘Are you going to drop him?’ I asked.
‘God, no,’ she said, ‘but I am going to get this other boy out of my system and I know I’ll go back on to Mike Yu.’
‘What other boy?’ I said, furious.
‘Just some boy,’ she said. ‘I’m just using him for the sex because Mike won’t.’
She confided in me that she had started seeing her ex, Big Smig, the boy from Market Harborough who her parents really liked. Big Smig was a nickname. His real name was something like Rupert Smith-Browne. There was also a Little Smig in Market Harborough—Miranda was at pains to make clear that her Smig was the big one. Big Smig had a Kawasaki Z1B 900 and though it wasn’t as convenient as Mike Yu’s Datsun, especially in rainy weather, the Kawasaki was much sexier in Miranda’s eyes. Big Smig had taken the baffles out of the exhaust to make it that bit louder than it already was and it meant everyone looked at him as he roared by, in fact it was so loud everyone looked at him as soon as he started it up. Miranda explained that taking baffles out of a Kawasaki exhaust was the male equivalent of wearing a very enticing outfit—say, a low-cut blouse or a bum-skimming mini. Or a bird having colourful plumage or an interesting call. And Miranda found that exciting. He was the exact opposite of Mike Yu, who was modest and dignified and whose ambition wasn’t to turn heads but to live a happy and fulfilled life and do no harm and to start a foil container business and employ over one hundred people and breed sighthounds.
I realized then that dignity was what I admired most in a man—that, and a love of dogs. It did slightly worry me that Mike Yu might be planning to cook and eat the dogs he hoped to breed, but that was just a horrible racist thought of the type that everyone had back then. Even decent people, and I’m ashamed of thinking it.
The news about Big Smig was troubling and thrilling. While undoubtedly bad for Mike Yu it made my feelings for him slightly less wrong and illegal, and that was good for me. And I felt it took me a tiny step closer to Mike being my boyfriend, and thinking that was incredible. I’d only ever had one boyfriend and it hadn’t gone well. I’d realized pretty quickly that this boy and I were incompatible (because of everything he said and did), so I told him it was over. It took months for him to get the message. It was so excruciating, I thought I was going to have to pay someone to kill him.
But I was normal and neither a nympho, like the Owner’s Wife, nor asexual, like poor Carla B who never got the urge or imagined sex except to ward off car sickness—it is such a good warder-off of car sickness, better even than imagining winning the pools (for me anyway). But you have to start thinking about it as soon as you start your journey. There’s no point waiting until you’re a mile down the road and feeling queasy, you can’t then suddenly try to get in the mood for sexual thoughts. If you feel sick, it’s already too late and your best bet is to look out of the front window.
Anyway, Mike was semi-free of Miranda and that was overall a very happy-making thing.
24. Wedding Rings
I went into town on the County Travel with Miranda and Sally-Anne, who were going to look at clothing, but I had to leave them at lunchtime to meet my mother and sister at Green’s the Jeweller on Church Gate—to look at wedding rings. I was to represent Mr Holt and choose a ring for him. ‘Shouldn’t Jack choose?’ I’d asked but Jack had said, ‘No, thanks, I hate choosing other people’s wedding rings.’ Which was one of the funniest things Jack had ever said and made us all die.
And Mr Holt made it nice by saying, ‘In any case, Jack’s needed at the Snowdrop depot.’
I interviewed Mr Holt to find out his taste in wedding rings and he said all sorts of witty things that I wouldn’t be able to repeat to my mother. And in the end he just said, ‘No nonsense, love.’ Which made my job easy but boring.
My mother and sister were already in the shop when I got there. They were looking at the pendants—my mother was holding a great ugly cross up to her throat, with a thorn-crowned Jesus on it.
I got straight down to business and approached the shop assistant—a little fellow with an onyx ring on his right-hand ring finger, which seemed too big for his delicate hand and I thought must mean he was homosexual but could equally have meant he got a discount. ‘We’re choosing wedding rings,’ I told him, ‘for a man and a woman. The woman,’ and I pointed to my mother, ‘will want one of the nicest ones but the man wants something very plain, no nonsense.’
The shop assistant went to the glass cabinets flanking the walls and returned. ‘These are the plainest gentlemen’s,’ he said, placing a velvet-covered tray on to the table in front of me. ‘And these,’ he said, placing another, ‘are the nicest ladies’ rings.’
I called my mother over. The chunky crucifix was now resting on her sternum. We gazed at the gentlemen’s rings. ‘They’re very plain,’ she said.
‘He doesn’t want any nonsense,’ I reminded her.
We looked at the ladies’ tray—a collection of diamond-cut, engraved and fussy rings in different colour golds. ‘This one is yellow gold—a golden gold—and this is rose gold. This is pink gold and this, this is lovely, it’s rhodium-coated white gold.’
We picked up certain rings and tried them on and after a short while my sister said she had to go on an errand and she’d be back in a few minutes. I secretly knew she was looking at a second-hand wedding dress in the War on Want on Granby Street and we gave each other a sisterly look. The minute my sister had stepped out of the shop, Miranda and Sally-Anne appeared. I wished to God I hadn’t told Miranda that we’d be there because she completely took over the event and, though my mother had never thought much of Miranda, she very much enjoyed the way she conducted the whole thing, saying, ‘Look at the way it catches the light,’ and, ‘You’ll only have one wedding ring,’ and, ‘It’s a symbol of your love,’ and all that kind of thing that I imagined my mother was beyond.
It was easy to see how much time all this was taking since clocks kept chiming the quarter-hour and Miranda was not for speeding things up but kept asking for different trays to be brought out and saying which wedding ring she liked best—not that she was planning to buy hers there at Green’s but at Mappin’s of Bond Street, London, or even Tiffany’s in the US of A (her words)—and also that she was planning to get her dinner service from there, a replica of the one ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson commissioned Tiffany to design for the White House, featuring ninety flowers and all sorts of fronds and leaves.
This sickened me. Not only because it was supposed to be my mother’s wedding ring event but because it mad
e me feel funny about her trapping Mike Yu with yet more disgusting plans and status symbols.
In the end, there was no wedding ring my mother liked. Not a single one. The main problem being she hated the idea of marriage but truly loved her husband-to-be and no ring the shop assistant showed us (or Miranda chirruped about) no matter how it ‘caught the light’ quite matched my mother’s feelings and though I’d seen a nice plain band for Mr Holt, she thought it bad form to buy his and not hers. So, we decided to call it a day and Miranda and Sally-Anne left.
My mother took off the crucifix, we thanked the assistant (who had been extraordinarily nice) and started to leave. On our way out my mother’s eye was caught by a tray of mixed trinkets in the porch window.
‘What are these?’ she asked the fellow.
‘That tray is entirely second-hand,’ said the assistant, ‘but there are a couple of handsome rings amongst it.’ And there were.
My mother fell in love with a traditional Irish Claddagh ring—a crown with two hands holding a heart and which represented love, loyalty and friendship (the hands: friendship, the heart: love, and the crown: loyalty). This ring had come from Galway and had a mark on it to say so. This appealed. My mother adored Ireland, especially the west, and said it had all the best creative minds and that for every brilliant writer there was a sister who could paint like anything and an even better poet cousin and that they could all build canoes and tame animals to boot, and then the assistant said he was from County Kildare and had raced horses at the Curragh and my mother pretended to know it and then changed the subject.
Sitting quite close to the Claddagh on the second-hand tray was a plain gold ring. ‘What’s this one?’ asked my mother.
‘It’s a nine-carat utility ring from the war years,’ said the assistant, picking it off the velvet and peering at it with his tiny telescope, ‘so called because it weighs less than two pennyweights. The two rings came together.’
‘You mean that these rings were married to one another?’ my mother asked.
‘I believe they were, madam,’ said the assistant.
‘Oh, my God,’ said my mother, ‘that’s incredible, don’t you think, Lizzie?’ and I said I supposed it was.
‘Don’t you think that’s the most romantic thing in the world?’ she asked the assistant, and he said it really was very romantic indeed. And my mother had to dab her eyes.
My mother couldn’t fully decide until my sister came back. ‘I must just check with my daughter,’ she said. ‘I always need her seal of approval.’
I was stunned. She’d had my seal of approval, why did she need my sister’s? I thought I was the top seal of approval. I was the one most like her, who understood her. I’d said I thought the rings were romantic etc. And she herself fucking loved them and had cried real tears over the idea of them and now we had to wait for my sister to come back and give the final seal.
And when she did, two minutes later—with a bag—the assistant showed her the Claddagh and the utility ring and she said they were so perfect and meaningful she might cry, even though she wasn’t the type, and the assistant looked relieved.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said, ‘I’m not sure about the ladies’ ring, I’m not sure I like the little hands, they’re a bit monkey-like.’ But the assistant and my mother and my sister didn’t even hear me.
Anyway, my mother paid for them with cash and left Mr Holt’s there to be engraved with a secret message. Before we left the shop my mother asked what was in the bag and my sister took out a silky dress and it was as though someone had thrown a jug of cream across the carpet. She held it up and there were embroidered vines and twisted silk for straps and the bottom was fluted like a slim, cream lily.
‘What’s that?’ asked our mother.
‘It cost one pound-fifty,’ said my sister, which didn’t answer the question but seemed like good value.
25. The Fight Back
Even though Newfields were getting all the available patients, Sister Saleem never indulged in badmouthing them—the rest of us did, though. We called it ugly, modern and soulless, and said the nurses looked like clapped-out old prossers. How could the patients be happy, we wondered, when there wasn’t a tree or a leaf in sight, let alone a reservoir view? It was all wipe-clean and plastic, nothing was antique or unique (not counting the patients themselves) and the nurses were only there for the money. Sister Saleem’s attitude was, if GPs were recommending the place and patients choosing to go there, they must like what Newfields had to offer. It was a free market and instead of childish name-calling and envy, we should take note and make our home more attractive and get it noticed. We should fight back.
And when Newfields put out a brand-new, glossy eight-page brochure packed with activities, amenities, facilities (including their new ‘Stair-levator’ stair-mounted lift) and smiling 65-year-olds sniffing sweet williams, Sister Saleem just leafed calmly through it and used it to gently motivate us.
‘Look here,’ she said, ‘they have daily chairobics to improve flexibility—we can do that. They have goldfish, bingo, games afternoons and Vicar visits—we can do all that.’
And then, after a long talk with the owner, Sister Saleem announced that Paradise Lodge was going to fight back with a full-colour illustrated advertising leaflet which would be distributed to appropriate places throughout the county and really get the Paradise Lodge name ‘out there’. It was important news, but without the actual leaflet there to admire, it was difficult to get excited.
Also, we were to have the builders in to make a series of small but important and very visible improvements to the place.
Carla B, who’d worked at Newfields, talked us through the Newfields brochure. She said the people in the pictures weren’t bona fide patients but models from the ABC School of Dancing where the Owner’s Wife and Dee-Anna were taking lessons, and the tropical fish tank had been on loan from the Red Rickshaw for the shoot, and she told us that there was a secret plan to throw Newfields open to the public the following Whitsun holiday (by which time the grass and saplings would have grown a bit), when they’d offer tours of the home, with entertainments, local celebrities, Radio Leicester and refreshments. And it would become an annual event—maybe even the highlight of Whitsun.
‘She’s going to invite everyone and it will all be free and fun,’ said Carla B.
‘Why don’t we have an open day,’ I shouted, ‘but sooner?’
‘Brillo, Lis!’ said Sister Saleem. ‘We will beat them to it.’
Then we did get excited. We all chattered like mad about what we might do at our open day until Sister Saleem shut us up and scheduled a meeting for the following week where we could all share ideas and suggestions sensibly. We talked of almost nothing else all week.
Sister wondered if we should get a local choir to sing—maybe even her church—but we all said no. The patients and villagers were up to their necks in choirs and would prefer some amusing and interesting turns, like Miranda’s moving dance to ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ or Carla B’s cancan, which showed her pants, but fleetingly (that being the point). Sister agreed but drew the line at Big Smig reciting ‘Mary had a little lamb’ in burps. I couldn’t think of anything to do.
My sister suggested bringing Sue the dog to do her jumping out of the window trick, which she loved doing and for some reason looked hilarious, especially after being told, ‘Stay, Sue, do not go out of that door, Sue.’ It doesn’t sound much but I was certain the patients would love it, it being just their kind of silly humour.
Sally-Anne was too shy and awkward to perform any act but agreed, in theory, to wear a coat backwards for Eileen’s ‘two drunken men’ act. But Sister Saleem had misgivings and felt it might offend the owner.
Gordon Banks’ wife, Mindy, wanted her ten-year-old nephew to sing Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus, but we all groaned and said we didn’t want anything gloomy or serious. Mindy said he was double-jointed and could bend his thumbs back horribly at the end. I knew the Miserere and said i
t would be sacrilege to bend his thumbs back at the end and Mindy said she was just trying to add a comedy note. In the end we said he could sing ‘Mother Of Mine’ or ‘Wings Of A Dove’ and she was happy. The cook wanted to bring her dog, Brandy, in and have it attack the Hoover, which was apparently great fun to watch, but we’d already got Sue’s window leap to look forward to so asked the cook for a boiled ham instead.
Carla B talked endlessly about the importance of bunting and tried to recruit people to help her sew the necessary yards of it but no one volunteered, and she was on her own. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was somehow connected to her being asexual and wanting some kind of elaborate physical activity.
I haven’t said much about Carla B (apart from her being asexual). But I’d like to add here that I started liking her (or rather sympathizing) when she’d said one day, ‘I used to love Mondays and longed for school to start again,’ meaning she hated being at home at weekends. It made me think she must’ve had a miserable home life. In my opinion, having a miserable home life is the worst thing to have—whoever you are—because it should be where you’re able to rush in and go to the toilet and flop on the sofa and cry at the horror of the world, or laugh at the silliness of it, and not dread being there. God. And thinking that made me realize how nice my own home was and, even more so, how nice Paradise Lodge was and how much we all, patients and nurses alike, loved to be there—crying or laughing or on the toilet. And that was a huge deal and I considered offering to speak along these lines at the open day. I might have said that I liked being there so much that on my split shifts, in the break between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. when I could have jumped on a bus to somewhere exciting or gone upstairs to the off-duty nurses’ quarters and listened to records or gone for a walk in the pretty countryside, I preferred to hang about, sitting on the arm of an easy chair, showing a lady how well the Norwegian hand cream rubs in compared to Nivea and doesn’t leave a greasy residue, although I’d have had to admit to preferring the smell of Nivea for a general body lotion. Still do. I didn’t offer to speak, though, because the sad fact is that ideas of this kind just don’t come across, you can’t tell it, you have to feel it for yourself. But to me it was a huge revelation.