The Generation Game

by Sophie Duffy

  So Bob turns his attention to Sheila, waiting patiently in the wings.

  Sheila is only too happy to accept Bob’s attention as it has been quite some considerable time since Bernie has thrown any her way. She has never forgotten what it is to be a woman and always dresses accordingly in frocks and skirts and blouses – the finest St Michael’s has to offer. This is partly what attracted Mother to Sheila, though of course Sheila is not in Nina’s league as far as Style is concerned. But Sheila is the best of Torquay women of distinction. And Sheila is the best Bob can aspire to. They form a new partnership of sorts. Companionship with a twist of romance, enough to make them both feel they are real. That they will not blow away on a gust of wind.

  Over the next fortnight, while Helena and Orville go-a-courting (where exactly, I have no idea, for they never ask me to go along with them as I am somewhat of a passion-killer), Bob and Sheila muddle along, slightly gauche, slightly clumsy, completely alive again (and a hideous embarrassment to Toni and Terry who can’t bear to think of their mother as having the same surging hormones as them). Until the Welsh woman from the antique shop in St Mary’s church turns up at the newsagents as Bob puts Sheila’s cup of tea on the counter where she is pricing up the sandcastle flags. (Lucas would have loved a packet of those.)

  ‘It’s Bernie,’ the woman says. ‘He’s in Torbay Hospital.’And, seeing Sheila’s face, she adds: ‘Don’t worry he’s not dead – it’s been a close shave, mind. A heart attack, I’m afraid. A big heart attack.’

  She waits a few moments, letting her news sink in, surreptitiously casting an eye over the magazines on display.

  ‘He’s been asking for you,’ she goes on. ‘And to be quite honest, he needs you more than me. He needs his family.’

  She moves towards the door and, before leaving, turns and says: ‘This is a bit awkward, you see. I’m going back to the Bay. Tiger Bay. I’ve had enough of this one. I’m sorry. It was a bit of a mistake, really.’

  Then she exits the shop, the half-hearted bell tolling her departure.

  I do not like Orville Tupper. He hardly notices my presence at all, rarely bothering to look down from his dizzying height to the land where I live. I don’t matter one iota to him. And I don’t matter to Helena either, for late one Saturday afternoon, when I return from the Bone Yard, falling into the shop in my normal Philippa way, Helena isn’t there. Helena has gone. She has vanished. Vamoosed.

  I call up the stairs for her. I look in her room, the one next to mine. It is unusually tidy and I can see straightaway that she isn’t there either. I even look in Bob’s room in the attic, where he relocated after we moved in so we could have our own floor. There is an assortment of cardies lurking in his wardrobe, but not my mother. She is nowhere to be seen.

  She has gone. But she is not lost. She is not even mislaid. She has flown away, not on a cloud to Heaven like Lucas, but on a Boeing 747 to Canada, according to Bob who has to break the news to this seven-year-old girl. ‘Maybe she’s been kidnapped by Orville Tupper?’ I ask, hopefully. But Bob says nothing which tells me everything. Instead, he pats me gently on the head and gives me a packet of Opal Fruits which I do not have the stomach to eat.

  I will never buy Vicks Sinex again. Not as long as I live. However blocked up and full of cold I become, I will not be reminded of the man who stole my mother.

  2006

  We have been removed to a side room. To give us some peace and quiet because it’s mayhem on the ward. Too many breasts and babies and bemused-looking men. And I’m an old mother. Old.

  “Please can we go home?” I beg Fran.

  “All in good time,” she says before going home herself for a well-deserved sleep (what about my sleep, haven’t I deserved one?).

  And now he’s here. Outside in the corridor. I can hear him pacing up and down the lino, his footsteps squeaking like an injured animal. I know it’s him though I haven’t actually seen him. A nameless nurse pops her head round the door, primed by Fran, to inform me that my husband has turned up with a teddy bear. Yes, a teddy bear. For you. He won’t get around me that easily. I will not be bribed.

  That name, label – ‘husband’ – attaches Adrian to me in a way that makes me feel sick. All those images conjured up by that word, tumbling round my stomach, surging through my blood, tingeing my milk with a nasty taste so that I am petrified you will never want it.

  To have and to hold. Where was he when I was pushing you out? To love and to cherish. Where was he when he was supposed to be with me? Till death us do part. I feel like killing him right now. Forsaking all others. Yeah, right.

  “Tell him to go home,” I bark at the nurse the next time she dodges in, and I get an angelic sympathetic smile in return.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  So he leaves, my husband, quietly. A squeak that grows faint and then the distant thud of a door closing. He doesn’t even bother to kick up a fuss.

  I don’t know where he’s gone. Not to our home. But I have you and your home is with me.

  Chapter Seven: 1972

  The Apprentice

  These days I would be taken in by Social Services and fostered out to a family with a clutch of other abandoned children. But at this moment in time there is no question of that; I stay on at the shop with Bob. Neither of us really believes this arrangement will continue forever. Surely Helena will come back and resume her rightful place at the counter at some point in the near future? Maybe she’s just gone on holiday and forgotten to mention it in all the dizzy rush of packing and organising a foreign trip. Maybe she’ll send me a postcard of a Mountie sitting proudly on his horse and bring me back a racoon’s tail hat (á la Davy Crockett) as a souvenir.

  But it isn’t a postcard that flutters through the shop letterbox onto the Embassy doormat. It is an airmail letter with a row of stamps Lucas would have spent his pocket money on. It arrives one Saturday morning a few weeks after Helena’s departure. I am on my way to Auntie Sheila’s when the postman hands it over to me in such a gingerly fashion that I wonder if it is one of those letter bombs. My name is on the front in Helena’s school girl handwriting (which is much neater than my school girl handwriting as she spent several hours a day practising it in her boarding school in Wales and Miss Mothball isn’t particularly bothered how neat our writing is as long as we ‘get on with it quietly’). I peel open the seal very carefully and unfold the tissue-thin letter, catching the faintest whiff of Helena’s perfume-mixed-with-cigarettes.

  My reading has suffered without the benefit of Lucas’ tuition. So I hand the letter over to Bob, lurking nearby, shuffling some packets of tic tacs on their stand. He coughs dramatically (for this is most definitely a dramatic moment, my future hanging there amongst the Sherbet Dib Dabs and Daily Mails) and then begins:

  Dear Philippa

  I hope you are well and being a good girl for Bob. I am sorry I didn’t say goodbye. Orville asked me to marry him and I said yes. There is no room for you at the moment in his condominium (flat) in Toronto. He is very busy with his work and I am also busy looking for work so that we can buy a bigger condominium and there will be room for you. I think you are better off at the shop for now. You can go to school and see your old friends and Bob is the best father you could ever hope for.

  (At this point Bob chokes up and has to blow his nose.)

  Please don’t be cross with Mummy.

  All my love

  Helena.

  And there it is: the truth of it, there in that name, Helena. I see that she is as confused as I am. She has never been a fully-fledged Mummy. There has always been such a strong part that has remained Helena. And that is the part she is now embracing in Orville Tupper’s small condominium (flat) in Toronto, while the Mummy part is kept at arms’ length. Kept over the ocean.

  Bob smiles at me with that smile which completely passed my mother by.

  ‘She thought she was doing the right thing by you,’ he says. ‘She thought you’d be better o
ff here, with me.’

  He looks as bemused as I feel, his hands searching inside the pockets of his baggy cardigan as if he’ll find the answer in there. But somewhere deep down, that niggle returns. Maybe Helena is right. Maybe I am better off with Bob.

  Bernie toes the line now he is invalided by the weak heart that over-exerted itself one too many times in his philandering days. He can pay more attention to matters closer to home including why all his bamboo canes are missing from his dilapidated greenhouse. He doesn’t dare exert himself these days. He doesn’t dare do anything more strenuous than a bit of pottering about the garden, weeding the alpine rockery and dead heading the roses. He’s given up his Lot. There was a retirement party at (appropriately) the Berni Inn where men in greasy ties made feeble jokes about dodgy tickers and faulty starter motors. But the biggest change in his lifestyle is his avoidance of women. On the cusp of his twentieth wedding anniversary, he has at long last forsaken all others.

  Sheila can’t give up Bob though. She still hankers after him, his good heart and his warm smile that came out all wrong when he aimed it at the true woman of his dreams (Helena/Mummy). Sheila comes into the shop, like the old days, under the pretence of purchasing a Western Morning News or a packet of Extra Strong Mints, but really to be with Bob, to check up on me and to keep an eye on Patty.

  Patty is a school leaver that Bob has procured to roll up her sleeves and lend a helping hand, though Patty does it in return for a paltry wage that she spends on clothes and make-up. It is these clothes and make-up that worry Sheila because when Patty is kitted out in them she could easily be mistaken for a member of Pan’s People (to Toni’s annoyance). Patty has giraffe-length legs and a Marie Osmond smile. Sheila needn’t worry though. Bob is quite oblivious to Patty’s charms; he is relieved to have her cheap and efficient labour. And as for me, Patty is another longed for big sister, the other one being Toni of course – which is just as well because unfortunately I am soon to lose Toni. All that ballet practice has led to her being accepted by the Royal Ballet School. She is leaving for London next week (lucky thing).

  I am invited along on a final shopping trip to Tip Taps, a dance shop in Paignton. It is a small shop packed out with pink tights and leotards of every shade you can think of. Some of the costumes look like they’ve been hanging there since before the War. The elderly gentleman who owns Tip Taps is less like a dancer than you could possibly imagine with his thick-set frame, Dennis Healey eyebrows, handlebar moustache and Harris Tweed. He’d be more at home in the cockpit of a Spitfire. Sheila hands over the list she’s been sent from the ballet school and each time Toni pirouettes out of the changing room – a flimsy curtain in the corner behind a stack of shoeboxes – Auntie Sheila has to reach for a fresh hanky (she’s come well prepared) and the elderly gentlemen blushes the colour of the red ballet shoes hanging above the counter. Toni has sprouted into womanhood and no-one has noticed until we are brought face to face with it in this small corner of Paignton. She is a woman and she is going to London and poor Auntie Sheila is beside herself. But I do not feel sorry for her. I feel cross and angry and worried that there will be no-one to fret over me when it is my time to up and leave. Or maybe I am destined to stay forever by the seaside.

  Two years on and the situation has changed very little (apart from a new Doctor Who). I still have no mother but I do at least belong to a gaggle of girls at school. I am officially accepted into their circle – though perhaps somewhat on the circumference – mainly because they are short of some muscle when it comes to confrontations with the boys who rule the playground with their football and their spit. I am no longer Poor Lucas’ Friend. Somehow I have swallowed Lucas up into my persona and give off the aura of quiet strength that he had. I am Philippa, the Tough Nut.

  I also have a badge of honour: Library Monitor. This is somewhat ironic considering my illiterate beginnings but all that hard work in the Bone Yard amongst the tombstones must have finally paid off and I am at long last reading like a veteran. I have read so many books that I can help the little ones with their book choice and try to steer them away from the B section (Blyton) and towards such modern books as Stig of the Dump or James and the Giant Peach. For those who haven’t yet mastered the mysteries of reading there is always Dr Seuss further down by the leaking beanbag.

  I am not left alone in my duties. Miss Parry, who looks like she could have been a Tudor queen in a former life, is the archetypal librarian: she is stern and quiet and knows her books inside out. She defends the Dewey Decimal system to within an inch of her life and would burn heretics at the stake in the defence and upkeep of the library rules. The library rules – NO TALKING, NO RUNNING, NO EATING, NO DRINKING – are pinned up in bold print at several prominent points in the small library so there is no excuses for them not to be known off by heart by anyone passing through (except of course if you can’t read which is where the rules usually fall down).

  ‘Philippa, please can you deal with C section. The infants have been on the rampage again.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Parry,’ I nod like an eager Jack Russell, an image of little savages with woad smeared across their cheeks running bare-chested across the dangerously-polished boards of the library spurring me on.

  And I have to agree with Miss Parry here. The infants are a disgrace when it comes to filing. Ca’s and Co’s and Ci’s all over the shop (as Wink would say).

  And then I see it. The Penguin History of Canada, a single red maple leaf fluttering on the cover as I flick through this grownup book that has somehow made its way into the school library. And I feel my legs weaken, all my strength sapping away like tapped Maple syrup.

  ‘Philippa, are you all right?’ Miss Parry rushes over to me in an unprecedented fashion and touches the back of her cool hand against my forehead. ‘Low blood sugar,’ she diagnoses with confidence. ‘Deep breaths, Philippa,’ she urges, as if the Armada are attacking. ‘Don’t move,’ she orders, sitting me down on the library’s one and only comfy chair, ‘I’ll be two ticks.’ And she disappears, leaving me alone with my head in my woollen skirt, listening to the distant thud of children being let out to play, little feet storm-trooping down the corridor and out onto the tarmac beyond. The shriek of scattering seagulls. A teacher’s whistle. A heavy door closing with finality. Then all sound stops and it is just me, alone, in the musty library, the smell of old books and beeswax. The warmth of the chair beneath my legs, my head upside down, the sickness in my stomach, a pain in my chest, feelings inside me that have been gurgling for so long, ignored and unnamed, but that are now set to explode. Canada… Orville Tupper… Helena.

  ‘Sit up now, Philippa.’ Miss Parry shouts across the room, rushing over with a half-full glass of milk and a Rich Tea biscuit that she has procured from an unknown source (thereby contravening all the golden rules in one fell swoop, the whole gamut of library law smashed to smithereens by this Tudor queen). When I’ve nibbled at the biscuit and sipped at the milk, I look at her face trying to find a trace of motherhood. She clearly finds this awkward, examining her wristwatch as if she’s forgotten how to tell the time.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Parry. I feel better now.’

  She cracks open a smile and her war mask slips, revealing the woman beneath.

  ‘Do you have children, Miss Parry?’ I ask. She is almost as surprised as I am at this sudden question.

  ‘Well, no, Philippa, actually I don’t. You see, Mr Parry died soon after we were married so no, I don’t have children, I’m sorry to say.’ And in that sentence I learn so much about Miss Parry. She was actually Mrs Parry. She was married. A whole other life. The love of her life lost. She wanted children but never met another man to match Mr Parry. She will never be a mother now, not with all that grey hair and the look of war in her eye.

  ‘But I have my cats, Philippa. And my nieces and nephews. And all of you children.’ As she says this, the whistle blows in the playground and there is a surge for the heavy front door which bashes open under the tide of storm-t
roopers. Quiet conversation is no longer possible and Miss Parry raises her eyes heavenward. I do the same. And she smiles.

  ‘And what about you, Philippa? Have you heard from your mother?’

  My cheeks burn at the mention of my mother. Tears swarm into my eyes but I beat them back, biting my lip. Miss Parry might have the body of a weak and feeble woman but she has the heart and stomach of a librarian and there is no way I am going to let the side down by crying.

  ‘She’s in Canada, Miss Parry. She’s going to send for me when she has a bigger place.’

  ‘I see,’ she says, like she can indeed see all the way over the Atlantic Ocean. ‘And are you happy living in that sweet shop of yours?’

  No-one has actually asked this question of me before so I take a few deep breaths to consider the state of my happiness. And yes, I have to say, I am happy. Happy enough.

  ‘Yes, Miss Parry.’

  She laughs then. A surprisingly girlish laugh and offers another Rich Tea. ‘Watch the crumbs or we’ll be in trouble.’ She winks at me.

  Ten minutes later I am back in class squashed next to Christopher Bennett on the carpet as we learn about high and low sounds. I listen to the voices around me. You can tell a lot about someone from the sound of their voice. A mother’s voice should be as sweet and comforting as raspberry jam. I can’t clearly remember my mother’s voice – only the occasional echo that I catch on waking up in the early morning, the same way I hear the gulls call or the waves break on the red sand of my town: you have to really listen to hear it. Wink has a voice that sounds like she must’ve been a sword swallower at some point in her long and varied career. Bob has a hesitant voice – a cough in the middle of a sentence, a subordinate clause, a get-out clause. Mandy Denning has a high voice like a baby bird. Christopher Bennett has the low gritty voice of a northern comedian on Opportunity Knocks. But Miss Parry has the perfect voice, quiet and forceful and full of knowledge and tragedy. I try to recall her parting words to me outside the classroom door, where I had to leave her behind in order to go and sit cross-legged on the carpet and endure the tumult of a badly-orchestrated music lesson. Her words: ‘I only come into school a few hours a week, you know. To keep things in check or there’d be anarchy. Come and see me in the town centre library. That’s where I do my proper job. It’s about time you joined up and got your own library tickets.’