This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  I remembered Beth telling me how she had driven over to the mill once, for a shareholders’ meeting, and how the company accountant had pinned her up against the wall of his office. Oh, he was mad on women, she had told me. His kisses had tasted of cigarettes, apparently, and his moustache had tickled her nose, making her want to sneeze. Afterwards, he pressed a ten-pound note into her hand, for petrol. Take it, Beth, he’d said. It’s your money, after all.

  But Beth was talking about my mother. ‘I think it was her religion that held her back from going out with too many,’ she said, ‘and I don’t think she’d permit hardly anything, if you know what I mean. She was a believer, through reading the bible and going to church such a lot.’

  ‘She might have gone on dates, then,’ I said, ‘but nothing would have happened.’

  ‘No. She was very strict. She enjoyed it, but in an innocent way.’

  ‘That fits in with what you said about her voice.’

  Beth nodded firmly. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So it’s possible,’ I said slowly, ‘that my father was the only man she was ever with?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m sure.’ And then, almost in the same breath, ‘She told me that she went on top. Because Rod couldn’t. He wasn’t well enough. Got exhausted.’

  Earlier, I had been speculating on the workload Wendy must have had, with a disabled husband, three young children, and no help in the house, and Beth had exclaimed, ‘She was a slave.’ The vehemence had startled me. Once, Beth said, while staying with my parents, she had followed Wendy out to the scullery after lunch to see if there was anything she could do. Rod had already gone upstairs to lie down. She helped clear the table and wash up, then watched as Wendy poured some milk into a pan. It was for Rod, Wendy told her. He always had hot milk before his rest. Since Wendy had been on her feet all day, Beth offered to take the milk upstairs for her. No, no, Wendy said. Rod liked her to do it. She did everything for him, Beth had told me. She had four children, really.

  I asked Beth if Wendy had ever seemed tired.

  ‘Within the last year of her life,’ Beth said. ‘The last few months. She came up to Dosthill, and I noticed that her facial colour had changed.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It was more transparent – almost blue. And she seemed very tired then. Rod – your father – was talking to me in the red room, and after so long Wendy said, That’s enough, Pansy. But it was because she was tired …’

  I shifted on the green chaise longue. The deep carpet of paper – clothing catalogues, holiday brochures, order forms for book clubs – rustled beneath my shoes. Over the years, various people had voiced theories about my mother’s premature death, the most common being that the contraceptive pill had killed her – instances of blood-clotting were reported in medical journals as early as 1968 – but perhaps she had simply taken on more than she could manage and had worn herself out.

  ‘She really worshipped you,’ Beth said suddenly.

  ‘Did she? I mean, how do you know?’

  ‘Oh, you could see it. In her face. And the way she hugged you! I remember, once, it was so cold, and she was in a sweater, hugging you as tightly as she could …’

  It ought not to have been a surprise to hear that my mother loved me – I was the firstborn, and there were plenty of photos of us together – but I had always had to take that love on trust. I’d had to make up what she felt – to imagine how strong it must have been. I’d never actually known. Though I was grateful for Beth’s words, there was also a part of me that refused to believe her, and wanted proof.

  ‘Are you warm enough?’ Beth asked.

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘Do you need a wee?’

  I spluttered. ‘No –’

  ‘You mustn’t be shy.’

  ‘I’m not, Beth. Really. I just don’t have to go that often.’

  ‘Shall we make our meal, then?’

  Woken at eight the next morning by the steady crash of rain on the trees outside my window, I stepped on to the landing. Beth’s door was wide open. She was lying on her side, facing away from me, the blankets heaped around her neck. I stood in her bedroom doorway, and thought of all the other mornings, her asleep and no one to watch over her, no one there. Years ago, she had told me she’d seen policemen in her garden. They took up positions in the bushes, or sometimes they sat about under the fig tree. They were concerned for her security, but she was convinced they fancied her as well. They had binoculars, she said. She would leave newspapers and magazines out for them, and in the summer she bought ice-creams. They never ate them, of course. I thought of how she had lost her father to cirrhosis of the liver when she was three. Her mother, Margaret, still only twenty-seven, and beautiful, was an alcoholic too. She drifted from man to man, and Beth and her sister, Connie, were constantly being shunted off to various relations. As a teenager, Beth had even stayed with my grandparents in Rokkosan. Jim was the closest thing I had to a father, she had said. Uncle Eric would never put an arm round you. After the war, when she was studying art at the Royal College, she moved back in with her mother, who lived near Kew Gardens, but there was never any food in the house, and the drunks Margaret brought home from the pub would frighten her. Once, a second-hand car salesman with glassy eyes had chased her round the sofa. Mother was being naughty. Connie would often have to call the police. Beth was so hungry she couldn’t sleep. Actually, I was very near suicide. She was saved by her dog, Blackie, and their long walks in the dark along the south bank of the Thames. Connie had a job in a department store, and she bought tinned peaches and salmon, which she hoarded in her bedroom. Connie ate in secret. Margaret drank. When you starve, Beth had told me, everyone sounds miles away. She’d ended up at Dosthill, as she so often had as a child. She lived with her two uncles, Eric and Reg, for almost twenty years, and then, when Eric died in 1972, she used her legacy to move to Gloucestershire. She had been here ever since. The previous night, before going up to bed, I had walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Six as yet unopened two-pint cartons of milk stood shoulder to shoulder on the inside of the door, a wall against privation, against the past. I stepped back on to the landing, leaving my auntie to sleep on.

  Later, over breakfast, I brought up the subject of religion. I was thinking of what Uncle Joe had said on the way to my mother’s funeral. She’s where she always wanted to be – with God. Beth talked about how devout my mother was, and how she used to kneel by her bed at night and pray, even after she was married. Neither of us was sure where this religious conviction had come from.

  ‘I mean, it was a good thing,’ Beth said, ‘because she was a real Christian, but it worried me. Whether she knew – whether she had an idea –’

  ‘That she might die, you mean?’

  ‘She said to me once, I would hate to grow old. She had seen how Pim went, very old and wrinkly, with needle-holes all over her. I think she had a vision of ending up like that …’

  And her wish had been granted: she had died young, even before her own mother.

  The morning darkened. The rubbish in Beth’s living-room, which had looked white the day before, had taken on a greenish tinge. I carried our breakfast plates out to the kitchen and started washing up. Beth stood next to me and dried.

  ‘Uncle Reg had religious mania,’ she said.

  I remembered Reg from visits to Dosthill when I was a boy. He had small, furtive eyes and a bristling moustache, and his ears stuck out sideways, as if keen to gather sound. His voice had the pinched, nasal rasp of a two-stroke motorbike. Beth could imitate it perfectly. There was the time he led me off into the village without telling my parents, and for an hour they were panic-stricken, convinced that I had been abducted. Reg’s room was at the top of the house. His clothes hung all round the walls. Beth had told me that mice lived in his suits. I asked if they were pet mice. Oh no, she said. Wild. Reg liked to stuff his pockets with biscuits, she said, and the crumbs attracted them. She also told me that a pigeon nested in the trilby that he
kept on top of the wardrobe. Reg was a great believer in callisthenics. Once, Connie and a boyfriend were walking up the drive when they glimpsed a flash of white over by the lake. Naked from the waist down, Reg was lying on the grass with his legs in the air, doing his cycling exercises. Connie and her boyfriend burst into the kitchen, helpless with laughter. There was talk of a caterpillar and two peas. At the age of eighty-four, while winding the grandfather clock by the front door, Reg’s foot became entangled in the chains that worked the pendulum. He tried to extricate himself, but pulled too hard. Ironing in her room, Beth heard the crash. She hurried downstairs and found Reg on his back, under the clock, with just his little coconut head and one boot sticking out. He died two months later, on a Sunday, after eating a bowl of soup. That was one story. But I had also been told that Reg had fallen asleep in front of the big gas fire in the dining-room, and that when he woke, his socks were in flames, and that the shock had killed him. All that could reliably be said about Reg’s death, it seemed, was that some kind of domestic object had been involved.

  ‘He could preach so beautifully,’ Beth was saying. ‘I remember calling Joe. Come and sit on the stairs, I said. I want you to listen to Uncle Reg. He’s preaching in his bedroom. Honestly, it was so moving. He could use his voice like a really good actor. And Joe said afterwards that it was one of the best sermons he had ever heard.’

  ‘Reg never married, did he?’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he ever –’

  ‘Have sex?’

  I nodded.

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ Beth said. ‘He kissed a woman once, on the pier at Llandudno, and he said afterwards, That’s enough, that’s all. And that was as much as he ever did.’

  ‘It might have been against his religion,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  I ran more hot water into the sink.

  ‘Uncle Reg burned sprouts regularly,’ Beth said. ‘He would go upstairs to pray while they were cooking, and I’d think, What’s that terrible stink coming in under the door? I’d go down into the main kitchen, and there were black balls that used to be sprouts all burnt in the bottom of the saucepan, and the heat still on. Reg would come galloping down because he would suddenly remember, and I’d say, Too late, Uncle.’ She chuckled affectionately. ‘Eric used to spend hours scouring Reg’s pans.’

  We fell quiet. There was just the clink of cutlery and plates in the sink, and the splash of rain on the Japanese mountain ash outside the window.

  ‘Ralph’s religious, isn’t he?’ Beth said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen him for years.’

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘Most of the time I forget he even exists. But then something happens, and I remember.’ Once, in 1992, while I was living in London, one of Ralph’s credit card statements was sent to me by mistake, and I couldn’t help noticing that his credit limit was six times as big as mine. He seemed to be doing a lot better than I was. ‘Frank’s in touch with him,’ I said. ‘I could ask Frank, I suppose.’

  Beth turned her strangely kind yet startled gaze on me. ‘You should.’

  I pulled the plug and let the water drain out of the sink. ‘I think we’ve finished.’

  ‘You are good,’ Beth said.

  I grinned. ‘Not always.’

  It was still raining when the time came for me to leave, but Beth wanted to see me off. She put on a fawn raincoat, which she had got from Save the Children. Ten pounds it had cost, she told me. One of her best buys ever. As I pulled away, I opened my window and looked out. Beth was standing by the garage in the downpour, bareheaded, waving.

  That morning, as we ate our eggs and bacon, I had promised to visit her again soon.

  ‘You’d better,’ she said.

  A Helicopter Crash

  One morning in late March, I push the kitchen door open. Ralph and Vivian are sitting at the table. Shoulders hunched, head tilted at an angle, Ralph seems utterly absorbed by what Vivian is telling him. I fetch a bowl of Weetabix and sit down with my back to the window.

  ‘You’re going to die when you’re forty-five,’ Vivian says in a soft voice.

  ‘Oh.’ Ralph looks crestfallen, but his eyes don’t leave her face. His whole body slants in her direction.

  She reaches out and puts a hand on his. ‘Sorry.’

  She appears taken aback by what she has just said, as if it came from somewhere outside her – as if, like a medium, she is merely channelling the information, and isn’t capable of exercising discretion or control.

  My first instinct is to spring to Ralph’s defence, but I quickly notice that he doesn’t need defending. If anything, in fact, Vivian’s prediction of his death has drawn them closer. Ralph has wrapped his hand round hers, and they are looking deep into each other’s eyes. Are they always so brutally honest with each other? If that is the case, perhaps I have been given an insight into the strength of the bond that exists between them. Ralph can handle any news, no matter how bad, provided he hears it from Vivian. And vice versa, presumably.

  ‘So when am I going to die, then?’ I ask.

  Vivian turns to me and takes a long pull on her cigarette. Her eyes are ringed with black kohl, and her dark hair falls straight past her shoulders, making her face seem narrower than it is. She considers me for perhaps ten seconds.

  ‘When you’re fifty-eight,’ she says.

  ‘Great,’ I say. ‘Thanks for that.’

  I glance at Ralph, and we exchange a rueful smile. If what Vivian is telling us is true, we are both already halfway through our lives.

  At that moment, the door creaks open and Robin moves slowly into the kitchen, his big arms dangling. A deep tramline runs diagonally across the left side of his forehead. The jug of water doesn’t appear to have worked this morning.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he says.

  I mention Vivian’s predictions. He immediately wants to know how long he’s got.

  Vivian doesn’t even bother turning round. ‘Seventy-two,’ she says.

  For some reason, we all burst out laughing – all of us except Vivian, that is. She seems distracted, even absent, as though operating on a different level altogether, and I suddenly remember how Dad would refer to her as ‘Svengali’. He claimed Ralph altered when he went to university – beyond all recognition, he would say – and he thought Vivian was the cause. The way he talked, you would think Ralph had been brainwashed, but now I’m sharing a house with Ralph and Vivian, I’m not convinced he was right. I think Ralph might have engineered the change himself. As soon as he left home, he was on the look-out for somebody to be with, somebody who would stay with him for ever, and the moment he met Vivian he knew she was the one. He couldn’t wait to cast off the person he had been – that almost pitifully affectionate little boy who became attached to every au pair Dad employed and was then repeatedly abandoned.

  He had to make sure that never happened again.

  He had to make quite sure.

  The following weekend, Robin and I have our first big fire, disposing of all the rubbish that the dustmen have refused to deal with. We feed the blaze with a tar-papered rabbit hutch, two rolls of carpet, and a box of toys that contains, among other things, a leprechaun, a plastic Rupert Bear, and several knitted gonks. The flames leap so high they char the branches of a nearby apple tree, and we worry briefly for the safety of the fence.

  Later, we are down by the house, ransacking the main glasshouse for more items that might be flammable, when Robin happens to glance over his shoulder.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he says.

  A column of oily smoke is rising from behind the hedge.

  ‘It’s the carpet,’ I tell him. ‘It’s got a rubber underlay.’

  ‘The neighbours aren’t going to like it.’

  ‘No. Probably not.’

  Robin watches as the blue sky blackens. ‘It looks like a helicopter’s crashed,’ he says.

  When we have dealt with the contents of the glasshouse, I s
uggest the pink wardrobe, which I have no use for. Robin’s eyes light up. In my room, we lower the wardrobe on to its side, take one end each, and manhandle it out of the house.

  ‘Now this,’ Robin says, ‘is really going to burn.’

  He leads the way up the garden, his left arm underneath the wardrobe, his right arm hooked over the top. When he reaches the fire, he pauses. Since he seems to be about to heave the wardrobe into the middle of the fire, I quickly hoist my end and shove it hard towards him. He lets out a cry and doubles over, clutching his armpit. The wardrobe crashes to the ground.

  ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Fuck.’

  Still hunched over, he gingerly lifts his shirt. A few dark drops land in the hot ash at the fringes of the fire. There is the pungent, medieval smell of burning blood.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I thought you were lifting it.’

  ‘It slipped. I was adjusting it – fuck, this hurts.’

  ‘Let me look.’

  ‘Bastard piece of furniture.’ Robin aims a savage kick at the wardrobe.

  I peer at the wound. A splinter almost a foot long has pierced the skin under his right arm.

  ‘At least it missed the artery,’ I say.

  ‘Artery? I could have died.’

  ‘No, you couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re going to live to seventy-two, remember?’

  ‘Vivian,’ he snorts. ‘What does she know?’

  The cut needs stitches, though, and as I drive Robin to the hospital I think of the time he climbed on to the top of a five-bar gate at Uncle Roland’s house when he was three. For a joke, I threw a picnic blanket over him. He looked, for a few moments, like someone pretending to be a ghost, then he lost his balance and toppled head first on to the concrete below. A sheet of blood slid down his face; his forehead began to swell. Suddenly I was alone on the drive, but I could hear his screaming coming from inside the house. It went on for longer than I thought possible. I wasn’t sure how to look at anyone, or what to say, and I wasn’t sure what I would see in their eyes when they looked at me.