At night, after he’d gone to bed, Patrick could hear his mother ‘s knitting needles clicking. Some nights she knitted in his dreams, and he saw not sleeves and heels and cardigan halves growing beneath her needles but pieces of their old lives. They were lumpy in places, and there were inconsistencies, and holes, and sometimes they came undone. And sometimes, if the tension was too great, they buckled.
It didn’t seem odd to Patrick that Aunt Joyce should come and stay.
‘Your mother’s going away for a little while, to have a rest,’ his father told him. ‘Aunt Joyce is going to look after us.’
Like the blue sofa, the rocking chair, the wallpaper, Aunt Joyce was a replacement. She looked very similar to her sister; people had always said so. In fact, the match was so close Patrick hardly missed his mother, hardly noticed she was gone.
‘I have something for you,’ Aunt Joyce said, ‘from Faye.’ She produced a small volume bound in red from her suitcase. ‘A Book of Golden Deeds,’ she said. ‘It’s one of Faye’s favourites, but I’m sure she won’t mind you having it, under the circumstances.’
‘That’s very kind,’ said Patrick’s father. ‘We lost all our books, of course. Very thoughtful, isn’t it, Patrick? What do you say?’
‘Thank you, Aunt Joyce.’
‘You’re sure Faye won’t mind?’
‘Not at all. She has too many others she never even looks at. Ronnie keeps buying them for her.’
That night Patrick began to read. A Golden Deed, wrote Charlotte M. Yonge, must be something more than mere display of fearlessness. Grave and resolute fulfilment of duty is required to give it the true weight. Such duty kept the sentinel at his post at the gate of Pompeii, even when the stifling dust of ashes came thicker and thicker from the volcano, and the liquid mud streamed down, and the people fled and struggled on, and still the sentry stood at his post, unflinching, till death had stiffened his limbs; and his bones, in their helmet and breastplate, with the hand still raised to keep the suffocating dust from mouth and nose, have remained even till our own times to show how a Roman soldier did his duty.
Patrick kept turning the pages until he couldn’t stay awake. He read of the Constant Prince, who offered himself as a prisoner so that the town of Ceuta could be freed; the Heroes of the Plague, who ministered to the stricken despite the danger of infection; the Shepherd Girl of Nanterre, who protected Paris from the murderous Franks and Huns; the Faithful Slaves of Haiti, who saved their white masters from massacre; and the Children in the Wood of the Far South, who were lost in the Australian bush for more than a week, the youngest surviving only because his sister gave him her dress for warmth. There was mention, too, of heroic canines such as Delta, who saved his master from the sea, from robbers and from wolves; a Newfoundland dog who won a silver collar by saving first a postman and then his bag of letters from a swelled ford; and the dog who daily carried bread to a shepherd’s child lost in a cave behind a waterfall. And oh, young readers, said Charlotte M. Yonge, if your hearts burn within you as you read of these various forms of the truest and deepest glory, and you long for time and place to act in the like devoted way, bethink yourselves that the alloy of such actions is to be constantly worked away in daily life; and that if ever it be your lot to do a Golden Deed, it will probably be in unconsciousness that you do anything extraordinary, and that the whole impulse will consist in the having absolutely forgotten self.
Before he went to sleep Patrick looked again at the name inked inside the cover: Faye Elizabeth Stratford, written in small, careful letters.
‘I wish they’d bring back summer time,’ said Aunt Joyce. She shook out Patrick’s jacket and held it open for him. ‘Daylight saving. We could do with some extra daylight. It’ll be chilly coming home from Ronnie’s.’
Patrick nodded. Aunt Joyce was always offering him portions of information: it was going to rain, there was fish pie for dinner, his father would be home late, Ronnie was coming to lunch. It was her way of keeping him informed, of ensuring he wasn’t upset by anything unexpected. He was not to be upset. He’d overheard his father saying so the first night Aunt Joyce stayed.
‘We were on summer time throughout the war, do you remember, Patrick?’ she said. ‘Even in winter. And then we had double summer time in summer. It was strange, the way it stayed light till so late, but I loved it.’
‘Why did they call it daylight saving?’ said Patrick. ‘If we lost an hour?’
Aunt Joyce sighed. ‘You got it back again, at the end of summer.’
‘What did they do with it that whole time? Did they keep it somewhere?’ Patrick had a sudden image of nationwide frenzy, concerned citizens rushing outside and collecting the daylight in buckets, bowls, wine goblets, putting it aside for leaner times. He wondered how it might be stored, how long it kept. Could it be frozen? What was the shelf-life of daylight?
‘Patrick,’ said Aunt Joyce. ‘For goodness’ sake. Your other arm.’ She held out the stiff jacket and pulled his hand through the hole as if threading a giant needle. ‘And this,’ she said, stretching a knitted hat down almost over his eyes. ‘It might be nearly summer but it’s still cool in the evenings. We can’t be having you catch cold, now can we?’
As they walked to Ronnie’s, Patrick began sweating under all the layers, but he didn’t say anything. Aunt Joyce held his hand, and whenever he looked up he could see fibres of wool; a haze of red, as if the clouds had changed colour, as if the sky were on fire.
‘You must be missing your mother,’ said Aunt Joyce, and Patrick, inhaling her perfume and wondering whether Faye smelled like that too, said yes.
When Doreen came home from her rest, she didn’t look rested at all. She moved slowly and spoke slowly and she’d turned grey. Her hair was brittle and stuck out around her face at odd angles, and her skin was very soft, as frail as ashes. And then Patrick realised. Along with his clothes and his books and the beds and tables and photographs and dinner plates, along with the blue sofa and the velvet curtains and the mirror in the hall, he’d also lost his mother in the fire.
Mrs Morrin came to visit her, a tin of biscuits under one arm and the crystal vase under the other.
‘So awful for you, Doreen dear,’ she said. ‘But haven’t you made a great effort with the house?’ She scanned the sitting room, ran one gloved hand over the sofa as if smoothing the folds of a dress.
‘The main thing is, we’re all fine,’ said Patrick’s mother, her hand shaking a little as she poured the tea.
Mrs Morrin handed her the vase. ‘I’d been meaning to get this back to you ages ago,’ she said, ‘but you know how the days just disappear. It was lucky I hung on to it in the end, wasn’t it?’
Patrick’s mother held the vase on her lap as she and Mrs Morrin sipped their tea.
‘I couldn’t believe how quickly they rebuilt,’ said Mrs Morrin, her chained reading glasses resting on her chest. ‘Mind you, they were here morning, noon and night, mixing the concrete and crashing about, weren’t they?’
Patrick’s mother smiled and sipped her tea, and rubbed her fingers back and forth across the ridges of crystal. ‘It’s lovely of you to return this,’ she said.
In the new house, though, there were no more flowers. Instead, Patrick’s mother placed the vase in the bathroom, on the marble cabinet. Sometimes, if she’d just had a bath, there would be talcum powder everywhere, resting on the cold linoleum, the edge of the bath, the chrome taps. It was like very fine, scented ash, and if Patrick lifted the vase he could see the flower-shaped base in negative, picked out in relief on the dark marble.
Slowly, month by month, Doreen began filling it with guest soaps, fancy coloured gobbets the size of small stones. Sometimes they were pale pink, like the inside of a shell, or sometimes violet, or the same shade of lemon as her fragile tea set. They came wrapped in translucent paper, as fine as a butterfly’s wing, which held the scent of the soaps even after it had been smoothed and placed flat in a drawer for safekeeping. She said the paper was u
seful for wrapping small gifts, but she rarely gave gifts, unless you counted the socks and ties and jumpers she knitted for Patrick and his father—and one did not wrap such masculine items in flimsy, scented paper. Every few weeks she would bring home another guest soap with her shopping, unwrap it and place it in the vase. But there were never any guests.
Then Ronnie took Aunt Joyce on a cruise, and Faye came to stay during the Christmas holidays. Patrick slept in the sitting room, and Faye had his room, and his mother left a small pile of fluffy towels and flannels on the end of the bed. On top of them, like an ornament, she placed one of her guest soaps: a pale green mermaid, one of a pair.
‘I’m sorry the towels don’t quite match, Faye,’ she said. ‘I do love matching towels. I had seven beautiful sets, wedding presents mostly. I had some mauve ones from Faye’s mother, actually, didn’t I, darling?’ She looked at Graham. ‘Joyce has always had such good taste.’
‘I’m sure these will be lovely,’ said Faye. ‘Patrick really doesn’t have to sleep in the sitting room, I’d be fine on the sofa.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Doreen. ‘It’s cold in the sitting room in winter. We might not have the space your mother does, but we still know how to treat a guest.’
‘I think the new house is very nice.’
Doreen piled another biscuit on to her niece’s plate. ‘Eat up, I made them specially,’ she said. She dabbed at the crumbs on her own plate with a moistened finger. ‘We did lose a few things, of course. We’ve been able to replace most of them, not all. But the main thing is, we’re all fine.’
When Patrick lay down on the sofa that night he found that he couldn’t stretch out. His legs were too long, or his body was, or perhaps even his neck. He didn’t take much notice of these changes from day to day, but here everything felt out of proportion, growing all at once. His arm trailed on the carpet, his fingers locating gritty crumbs. Under his hipbone the sofa was hard, packed solid with horsehair.
As he was falling asleep he saw himself on a huge greyish blue horse which shook him to his bones as it cantered along a beach. Sand sprayed up around him, caught in his nostrils, his hair, worked itself under his fingernails and his clothes. He felt like one of the heroes from his Book of Golden Deeds. The sea became a blur, and Patrick began to think the horse would run right into the water. Sand blasted his skin, and the horse bucked, and Patrick was thrown through the air. Instead of landing with a sting the way he did when he bellyflopped at the baths, though, he came to rest very gently in shallow water. He felt the waves sidling up his long arms, his legs. He imagined he could stay like that forever, and underneath him the sand moulded to the shape of his body, and he was not too gangly or out of proportion. Someone spoke his name, and the waves were lapping at him, stroking his hair. Patrick, said the voice again, Patrick.
Faye had slipped under the covers and was lying on her side, balancing on the hard edge of the sofa. Her hair was wet, and a strand of it slid across Patrick’s cheek. He could feel the line it left, like a snail’s silvery track.
‘I just had a bath,’ she whispered, ‘and I was so cold when I got out.’ She draped Patrick’s arm around her shoulder and shivered. His hand extended out past the edge of the sofa and hung in midair. ‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’ said Faye after a moment.
Patrick remembered what his mother had said: ‘You must be on your best behaviour when your cousins here. We don’t want any bad manners.’ He gave Faye a quick peck on the cheek.
‘I’m not your aunt,’ she laughed, and dived under the eiderdown. ‘You’re such a lucky boy,’ she said, or perhaps it was, ‘You’re such a naughty boy,’ Patrick couldn’t tell; the covers muffled her voice. And then she stopped talking altogether, and Patrick felt her mouth seal around him. Lucky, he thought. She must have said lucky.
He was woken by his mother pulling back the sitting-room curtains.
‘Go and call Faye, there’s a good boy,’ she said. ‘We’re having breakfast at the table today.’ She took a lacy tablecloth from the dresser and unfolded it with a flourish. She was wearing her good dressing-gown—quilted velvet piped with satin at the cuffs, hem and collar. Her hair was pinned into a sleek roll and it appeared she was wearing make-up. She seemed taller, too, and when Patrick looked at her feet he saw she was wearing high-heeled slippers trimmed with fur.
‘Are they new?’ he said.
‘Do you like them? My blue ones are looking scruffy already’ She hurried through to the dining room and placed four fringed mats around the table. In the middle she arranged a silver tray spread with a selection of small crystal dishes, each one containing a different type of jam or jelly or marmalade or honey. A silver bowl held tiny servings of butter, each one a perfect yellow curl.
‘It’s a lovely spot here in the morning,’ said Doreen, looking round at her husband and Patrick and Faye and beaming, as if eating breakfast at the table was the most normal thing in the world. Faye was buttoned up to the neck in a pink candlewick robe. A flannelette collar, also buttoned, was just visible. She did not meet Patrick’s eye.
‘It gets the sun until midday in the winter. Just what you need to wake you up.’ Patrick’s mother ruffled his hair. ‘Not as cosy as your mother’s breakfast nook, of course, Faye. She always likes telling us about her breakfast nook.’
‘Mum never bothers with breakfast. She’s too busy in the morning, getting dressed. Ronnie likes her to look smart.’
‘But breakfast is the most important meal of the day! She can’t go without her breakfast. Imagine, Graham!’
Patrick’s father sliced into a grilled tomato. ‘A cruise,’ he said. ‘That must be setting Ronnie back a fair bit.’
‘He doesn’t mind spending money,’ said Faye, smoothing her napkin carefully across her lap. ‘You can’t take it with you, he says.’
‘I’ve always wanted to go on a cruise,’ said Doreen. ‘So romantic, sailing the seas.’
‘I don’t think I’d like it,’ said Faye. ‘Being surrounded by all that water, and nowhere to escape to.’
‘Escape?’ said Doreen. ‘You wouldn’t need to escape. Everything’s right there, on board the ship. Everything you could ever need.’
‘Well,’ said Faye, ‘maybe Uncle Graham can take you on a cruise some time.’
‘Yes,’ said Doreen, ‘maybe. Now, dear, what will you have?’
Faye waved away rashers of bacon, fried eggs. ‘No thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll just have a piece of toast. I’m watching my weight.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Doreen.
‘When you’re dieting you never have breakfast either,’ said Patrick’s father. ‘Or lunch, some days.’
Patrick’s mother giggled. ‘Poor Graham! He thinks women are such picky creatures, Faye. Patrick, eat your egg.’
‘Faye said Aunt Joyce lives on coffee and cigarettes,’ said Patrick. ‘That’s how she keeps her weight down.’
‘Oh dear, I’ve forgotten the butter knife,’ said Doreen. ‘Would you just run and get it for us, Patrick, there’s a good boy. We can’t have Faye thinking we’re uncouth, can we?’ And she laughed her tinkly laugh.
‘Where is it?’ said Patrick.
‘Pardon, dear?’
‘The butter knife. Where’s it kept?’
‘Oh, you are a cheeky boy,’ laughed his mother, you know perfectly well it’s in the dresser drawer.’
From the sitting room Patrick could hear her questioning Faye about boarding school. He couldrn’t hear Faye’s replies, but his mother’s voice became more and more shrill as she insisted that Faye have a sausage, some more toast.
‘You must never have the chance to eat a proper breakfast, you poor love,’ she said. ‘Go on, have some bacon, that’s what I bought it for.’
Patrick couldn’t find a butter knife anywhere, so he took another ordinary knife from the kitchen. All over the bench were the sticky jars he helped himself to each morning with his toast. He usually left crumbs and streaks of butter in each one, but the jars were
all empty now. In the sink there were scrapings of reject jam, jelly, marmalade; the vestiges of previous breakfasts. The lids were scattered across the bench like dropped coins. Black currant, they said, strawberry, cherry, bitter orange.
After Faye left, Patrick moved back into his bedroom. He’d expected to find some trace of her there, a sock under the bed, a flimsy handkerchief, perhaps just a perfume lingering in the air. There was nothing. He’d been hoping his mother wouldn’t have changed the sheets, but of course she had. His bed was made up stiff and new, as tight as a closed book.
It wasn’t until the next morning that he found the mermaid soap. It must have fallen down the side of the bed at some stage, and Faye had never used it. Perhaps, Patrick thought, it had slipped under the covers; perhaps Faye’s body had warmed it in the dark. It had left a green smear on the floral wallpaper, as if an extra, blurry leaf had sprouted overnight. Patrick cupped it in his hand. It fitted there perfectly, the mermaid’s curling tail almost reaching the base of his thumb, and if he closed his fist it was completely hidden, and nobody else would know it was there.
‘Don’t use all the hot water,’ said his mother. ‘I’ve got a lot to get through today.’ She brushed past Patrick with an armload of dirty sheets and towels. She was back to wearing her blue slippers, he noticed, and hadn’t bothered to pin her hair up.
Only when he was in the bath did he unclench his fist. The green mermaid floated in his palm, moving slightly with the currents when he shifted his arms, his legs. He rubbed the soap over his skin and watched foam appear. The mermaid slipped and slid from his grasp like a tiny fish, and he had to keep snatching her back from the warm water, trying to make her last as long as possible.
When he got out of the bath he dressed for school. He studied himself in his mirror, and found he looked the same as ever. The same clothes, the same fine hair. He smelled different, though; every now and then, as he moved, he caught the scent of the mermaid soap on his skin. He scanned his bookcase for something to read on the bus. There was a space on the shelf. One of his books was missing.
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