Human Croquet Kate Atkinson

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HALF-DAY CLOSING

Charlotte and Leonard Fairfax, pillars of the community, although Leonard soon a broken pillar, dead of a stroke in 1925 and robbed of the chance to enjoy his fine new house on the streets of trees.

Charlotte took over the business as if she had licensed grocery in her blood rather than enamelware. Charlotte, the Fairfax matriarch, embracing her widowhood with such Victorian vigour that she was known by all and sundry as the Widow Fairfax.

The Widow liked her fine house, the finest of them all on the streets of trees. It had five bedrooms, a downstairs cloakroom, a butler’s pantry and airy attic rooms with fancy gables, in one of which the Widow kept Vera, her domestic drudge. Vera had an excellent view from her window of the Lady Oak, and beyond that to the haze of hills that looked like the work of a good watercolourist and, just visible in the distance, the dark green smudge that was Boscrambe Woods.

The Widow liked her big garden with its fruit trees and bushes, she liked the long drive at the front with its pink gravel chips and she liked the pretty wrought-iron and glass conservatory at the back which the master-builder had added as an afterthought and where the Widow kept her cacti.

The Widow had nice things. The Widow had things nice (people said). She had blue and white Delft bowls filled with hyacinths in the spring and poinsettias in her Satsuma ware at Christmas. She had good Indian carpets on her oak parquet and raw silk covers on cushions that were braided and tasselled like something from a sultan’s divan. And in the living-room she had a chandelier, small, George the Third, with ropes of glass beads and big pear-drop crystals like a giant’s tears.

Madge had escaped long ago by marrying an adulterous bank clerk in Mirfield and producing another three children.

Vinny looked as if she dined only on hard crusts and dry bones and was as sour as the malt vinegar that she dispensed by the pint from the stoneware flagon at the back. Vinegary Vinny, as old as the century but not quite as war-torn, born an old maid, but none the less married briefly after the First World War to a Mr Fitzgerald – a non-combatant chartered librarian with manic depressive tendencies – a man considerably older than his spinsterish wife. Vinny’s feelings about Mr Fitzgerald’s death (of pneumonia in 1926) were never entirely clear, although, as she confided to Madge, there was a certain relief in being released from the duties of married love. Vinny remained, however, in the small marital home which she had briefly shared with Mr Fitzgerald in Willow Road.

This at least, was her own domain, unlike the licensed grocery which her mother ran with a hand of iron and in which she was relegated to the role of mere shop assistant. ‘I could be as good a businesswoman as Mother if she would let me,’ she wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield, ‘but she never gives me any responsibility.’ The business was destined to be Gordon’s and as soon as he finished school the Widow made him wrap himself up in a white grocer’s apron and was very annoyed when he sneaked out of the house at night to go to classes at the technical institute in Glebelands. ‘Everything he needs to know is right here,’ the Widow said, pointing to the middle of her forehead as if it were a bull’s-eye. Uncomfortable in his grocer’s apron, Gordon stood behind the polished mahogany counter looking like he might be living a quite different life inside his head.

Then another war came and changed everything. Gordon became a hero, flying through the blue sky above England in his Spitfire. The Widow was excessively proud of her fighter-pilot son. ‘Apple of her eye,’ Vinny wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield. ‘Blue-eyed boy,’ Madge-in-Mirfield wrote back. Gordon was not blue-eyed. He was green-eyed and handsome.

Eliza was a mystery. Nobody knew where she came from, although she claimed it was Hampstead. She said Hempstid the way royalty might. She indicated, although not in a way you could pin down for certain, that there was blue blood, if not money, somewhere. ‘The ruddy silver spoon’s still in her mouth,’ Madge said to Vinny when they first met Eliza. Her accent was odd, very out of place in Arden with its nicely buffed-up northern vowels. Eliza sounded stranded somewhere between a very expensive boarding-school and a brothel (or to put it another way, upper-class).

The first time that any of Gordon’s family met the not-so-blushing bride was at the wedding. The Widow had been hoping for a nice quiet wife for her baby boy – drab with brown hair and an ability to budget. A girl who hadn’t been too educated and with ambitions that stretched no further than a local public school for the clutch of Fairfax grandchildren that she would produce. Whereas Eliza was a – ‘Vamp?’ Madge supplied eagerly.

For her wedding, Eliza – as slender as a willow, as straight as a Douglas fir (pseudotsuga menziesii) – wore a navy-blue suit with a tiny pinched-in waist, with a white gardenia in her buttonhole and a little black hat made of feathers, like a ballerina’s headband. The bad black swan. No bouquet, just crimson fingernails. The Widow gave a not-so-discreet little shudder of horror.

With her long steel-wool hair wired back in a bun, she looked like a Sicilian Widow rather than an English one. Her feelings about the wedding might be deduced from the fact that she had chosen to dress in black from top to toe. She watched intently as Gordon (‘my baby!’) slipped the wedding ring on to the finger of this peculiar creature. You would almost think she was trying to will Eliza’s finger to drop off.

There was something odd about Eliza, they were all agreed, even Gordon, although what it was no-one could quite say. Standing behind her in the register office, Madge experienced a convulsion of envy as she noticed how thin Eliza’s ankles were beneath her unpatriotically long skirt. Like bird-bones. Vinny wanted to snap them. And her neck like a stalk. Snap.

The Widow had insisted on paying for the reception at the Regency Hotel in case anyone thought that the Fairfaxes couldn’t afford a proper wedding. It was clear that no-one on Eliza’s side was going to turn up, let alone pay. Eliza, apparently, had nobody. They’re all dead, darling, she murmured, her dark eyes tragic with unshed tears. The same tragedy seemed to have infected her voice, throaty with notes of whisky, nicotine, velvet. She was Gordon’s treasure, found accidentally, Gordon plucking her from the wreckage of a bombed building in London when he was there on leave, even going back to retrieve her missing shoe (they were so expensive, darling).

My hero, she smiled as he placed her gently on the pavement. My hero, she said and Gordon was lost, drowning in her whisky eyes. The age of chivalry, bomb-dusted Eliza murmured, is alive and well. And is called?

‘Gordon, Gordon Fairfax.’

Wonderful.

‘Bit of a rush do, eh?’ Madge’s bank clerk husband winked, at no-one in particular, and Eliza swooped on him from nowhere and said, Darling, are we really family now? So hard to believe, and he retreated under a cascade of Hempstid vowels. ‘Hoity-toity, that one,’ Vinny said to Madge.

Eliza had dark, dark hair. Glossy and curly. Black as a crow, a rook, a raven. ‘A bit of the tarbrush?’ Vinny mouthed across the wedding cake to Madge. Madge semaphored amazement with her sherry glass and mouthed back, ‘Wop?’ Eliza, who could lip-read at a hundred paces, thought her new sisters-in-law looked like fish. Cod and Halibut. ‘Plummy,’ said Vinny dismissively to Madge over the sherry-toast to bride and bridegroom. ‘Fruity,’ said Madge’s husband, raising a lecherous eyebrow.

Really, Eliza said to the bridegroom, anyone would think I was a piece of wedding cake, and Gordon thought that he’d like to eat her up. Every last crumb, so that no-one else could ever have her. What wedding cake? grumbled the Widow, for this was a wartime cake made with prewar dates found at the back of the licensed grocery’s store-room. A hasty affair, ‘an expensive do,’ the Widow said to her fish daughters, ‘for a cheap you-know-what.’ Why have they married so quickly? ‘Something fishy,’ said Vinny-the-Halibut. ‘Suspicious,’ said the Widow. ‘Highly,’ said Madge-the-Cod.

Do they know Queen Victoria’s dead? Eliza asked her new husband. ‘Probably not,’ he laughed, but nervously. The Widow and Vinny lived in the Dark Ages. And they liked it there. Eliza said she couldn’t decide which would be worse, to be Vinny in Willow Road or to be Madge-in-Mirfield. She laughed loudly when she said this and everyone turned to stare at her.

Charles was born on a train, an event due to the capriciousness of Eliza who decided she needed an outing to the Bradford Alhambra when any normal woman in her condition would be sitting at home with her feet up, resting her piles and her varicose veins.

‘Premature,’ the Widow said, warily cradling tiny Charles in her arms. ‘But healthy, thank goodness.’ Softened, momentarily, by grandmotherhood, she attempted a smile in the direction of Eliza. Vinny inspected Bradford from the ward window. She’d never been this far from home.

‘And big,’ the Widow added, admiring and sarcastic and moved – all at the same uncomfortable time. ‘Just think,’ she said to Eliza, her eyes narrowing as the sarcastic won the battle, ‘what he would have been like if he’d gone the full nine months.’

Oh please – don’t! Eliza said, shivering theatrically and lighting up a cigarette.

‘A honeymoon baby,’ the Widow said speculatively, as she stroked the baby’s cheek. (‘Whose honeymoon though? Eh?’ Vinny wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield.) ‘I wonder who he looks like?’ Vinny wrote to Gordon. ‘He certainly doesn’t look like you, Gordon!’ No-one had more artificial exclamation marks than Vinny! (No-one had written so many letters since the decline of the epistolary novel.)

He’s an absolute cherub, Eliza said and, Oh God, I’d give anything for a gin, darling.

Charles’ arrival even made the papers –

GLEBELANDS BABY BORN ON TRAIN

the Glebelands Evening Gazette wrote possessively. That was how the Widow found out about her grandson, Eliza having neglected to send a message from the hospital where she was taken when the train finally pulled into the station. ‘Trust her to make the headlines,’ snapdragon Vinny sniffed.

Born on a train. People falling over themselves to help, the guard upgrading her to First so she had more room to grunt and groan (which she did in a very ladylike way, everyone agreed), the guard thinking that the way she said Darling, you’re an angel showed she was a First Class type anyway. It was difficult to know what to put on Charles’ birth certificate. He was a philosophical conundrum, like Zeno’s arrow, a paradox on the space-time continuum. ‘Where would you say he was born?’ Gordon asked, when he was next home on leave. Why, First Class, darling, Eliza replied.

Charles, sadly, was rather ugly. ‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ declared the Widow, the mistress of the baffling cliché.

Eliza, however (naturally, being his mother), declared that he was the most beautiful baby that ever existed. Charlie is ma darlin, she sang softly to a nursing Charles, who stopped the suck-and-tug at her breast long enough to smile a gummy smile up at her. ‘What a smiley baby,’ the Widow said, unsure whether this was a good or a bad thing. Eliza bounced Charles on her lap and kissed the back of his neck. Vinny unclamped her lips long enough to say, ‘He’ll be spoilt.’ How wonderful for him, Eliza said.

Gordon came home on leave at last and met his son, by now freckled like a giraffe and with a carrot-coloured tuft of hair sprouting from the middle of his large, bald head. ‘Red hair!’ Vinny said gleefully to Gordon. ‘I wonder where he got that from?’

‘He’s a sturdy little chap, isn’t he?’ Gordon said, ignoring his sister. He had already fallen in love with his red-haired son. ‘He doesn’t look a bit like you,’ Vinny persisted, as Gordon carried Charles around the house on his shoulders. ‘He doesn’t look like Eliza either,’ Gordon said and that much, certainly, was true.

Then Gordon had to go and fly through the greyer skies of Europe. ‘You would think’, Vinny sneered, ‘that he was fighting the Luftwaffe single-handed.’ ‘Nerves of steel,’ the Widow said. A man of iron. Heart of gold, said Eliza and laughed her bubbling, rather frightening laugh. Before the end of his leave Gordon had managed to get another baby started (an accident, darling!).

‘You’ll keep an eye on Eliza, won’t you?’ Gordon said to his mother before he left. ‘How can I not?’ she said, her syntax as stiff as her back. ‘She’s under the same roof, after all.’ In the bathroom, damp and steamy, the Widow had to brush through a forest of Eliza’s stockings hanging everywhere and wondered how this could be part of her duty. And another thing, the Widow thought, how did she get these stockings? Eliza was never short of anything – stockings, perfume, chocolate – what was she doing to get them? That’s what the Widow would like to know.

‘At least this child won’t be born on the move,’ the Widow said to Eliza. The Widow was worried that Eliza might be thinking about the Turkish Baths in Harrogate or a day-trip to Leeds. Eliza smiled enigmatically. ‘Bloody Mona Lisa,’ Vinny said out loud to herself as she smoked cigarettes for her lunch at the back of the licensed grocery.

Eliza drifted into the shop, as pregnant as a full-blown sail. She sat on the bentwood chair reserved for weary customers next to the huge red, gold and black tea-caddies with their faded paintings of Japanese ladies, big enough to hide a small child in. Eliza pulled Charles on her knee and sucked his fingers, one by one. Vinny twitched with disgust. He makes me laugh, she said, and as if to prove it she laughed her ridiculous laugh. A lot of things made Eliza laugh and not many of them seemed very funny to the Widow and Vinny.

The Widow ran her dust-seeking fingers over the black bottles of amontillado, checked the moulded butter-pats (thistles and crowns), the bacon-slicer, the cheese-wires. She rang sales into the huge brass till, as big as a small pipe organ, with such ferocity that it flinched on the solid mahogany counter. Straight as an ironing-board and almost as thin. Her skin as pale as pale can be, like white paper that had been creased and pleated a hundred times. The old hag. The old hag with her wormwood tongue and her hag-hedge hair the colour of gunmetal and ashes. Eliza sang to cover her thoughts because no-one was going to hear what went on inside Eliza’s head, not even Gordon. Especially not Gordon.

Eliza’s belly was like a drum. She placed Charles down on the floor. The drum was beating from the inside. Vinny could see something pushing against the drum-skin – a hand or a foot – and tried not to look, but her eyes kept being drawn back to this invisible baby. It’s trying to escape, Eliza said and, from the handbag at her feet, she took out her powder-compact, the expensive one that Gordon had bought for her – blue enamel with mother-of-pearl palm trees – and put on more lipstick. She rubbed her red lips together, as red as fresh blood and poppies, and smacked them open again for Vinny and the Widow’s disapproval. She was wearing a funny hat, all sharp angles like a Cubist painting.

I’m going out, she said, standing up so quickly, so awkwardly, that the bentwood chair crashed onto the wooden floor of the shop. ‘Where?’ the Widow asked, counting money, making little piles of coins on the counter. Just out, Eliza said, lighting up a cigarette and dragging hard on it. To Charles, she said, Darling, will you stay here with Auntie Vinny and Granny Fairfax?, and ‘Auntie Vinny’ and ‘Granny Fairfax’ glared at this interloper in their lives and wished that the war would finish and Gordon come home and take Eliza away and set up house with her somewhere far, far away. Like the moon.

The baby arrived three weeks early and Eliza claimed to be as much surprised as anybody. The Widow, determined not to be caught unawares a second time, was already on a war-footing.

The fire had been laid in the hearth ready (these were drizzling spring days) and the Widow had the bed made up with sheets both boiled and bleached. A rubber sheet and a chamber pot were stowed discreetly under the bed and an army of washbasins and ewers had been marshalled for the natal conflict.

Widow’s intuition made her come in from the conservatory where she was worshipping her cacti and she found Eliza on the stairs, clutching an acorn finial, doubled up in pain. Eliza was wearing her hat and coat and carrying her handbag and insisted that she was going out for a walk. ‘Fiddlesticks,’ said the Widow, who could recognize a madwoman when she saw one, not to mention a madwoman in an advanced state of labour, and she escorted Eliza firmly up the stairs to the second-best bedroom, Eliza struggling all the way. ‘Hellcat,’ the Widow hissed under her breath. She left Eliza sitting on the bed while she went off to boil important kettles. When she returned she found the bedroom door locked and no matter how much she rattled and shook, shouted and cajoled, the entrance to the delivery room remained barred. Vinny was summoned, as was the lumpen maid Vera and the man who helped the Widow with the garden. He eventually managed to kick the door in, but only after many encouraging shrieks from the Widow.

They found a tranquil scene in front of them. Eliza was lying on the bed, still with her outdoor clothes on, and was cradling something small and new and slightly bloody, wrapped in a pillowcase from the bed. She smiled triumphantly at the Widow and Vinny, Your new granddaughter. When the Widow finally managed to get her hands on the baby she found that the cord was already severed. A thrill of horror, like invisible electricity, jolted the Widow’s flat body. ‘Gnawed,’ she whispered to Vinny and Vinny had to run to the bathroom, hand clutched over her mouth.

And so Isobel was born on the streets of trees, near the muddled middle of the twentieth century, in a country at war, on the lumpy feather mattress in the second-best bedroom of Arden, her very first breath scented with the sour sappiness of new hawthorn.

The next morning the Widow went into the second-best bedroom, piously bearing a cup of tea for Eliza, and found Eliza, Charles and the baby all in a muddled heap together in the middle of the lumpy bed. The Widow put the cup and saucer down on the bedside table. The bedroom was awash with Eliza’s expensive underwear, flimsy garments made from silk and lace that provoked the Widow’s disgust. Charles was snoring gently, his forehead damp with sleep. Eliza rolled over exposing a naked arm, round and thin, but didn’t wake. For a second, the Widow had a troublesome vision of her son in this bed, his clean, heroic limbs trammelled in semi-naked harlotry. She had a sudden desire to retrieve the chamber pot from under the bed and beat Eliza about the head with it. Or better still, she thought, looking at Eliza’s white throat, strangle her with one of her own black-market stockings.

‘Like animals,’ the Widow said, slicing the cheese-wire fiercely through the centre of a big Cheddar, ‘all in the same bed, and her with hardly anything on. What will they grow up like? She’ll suffocate that baby. That isn’t how we dealt with babies in my day.’ Vinny imagined Eliza’s milk-swollen breasts, smelt her scent – perfume and nicotine – and grimaced.

The Widow peered into the depths of the rosewood fretwork of the crib. ‘There,’ she said with unaccustomed affection, and Eliza tucked in the baby blanket with blue rabbits embroidered on it, blue for Charles. ‘Gordon’s daughter,’ the Widow said, with more certainty than she’d ever said, ‘Gordon’s son.’

‘She’s got your eyes,’ the Widow added generously. ‘She’s got your everything,’ Vinny said, uncharmed. I wish, Eliza said softly, that she will blossom and grow. ‘What a silly thing to wish for,’ Vinny said.

Look, said Eliza softly, pulling back the shawl from the sooty head, isn’t she perfect? Vinny made a face.

‘What are you going to call her?’ the Widow asked. Eliza ignored her. ‘You could call her Charlotte,’ the Widow pursued, ‘it is a lovely name.’

Yes, but it’s yours, Eliza purred and stroked the shell-whorl of the baby’s ear. Her ears are petals, she said, and her lips are little pink flowers, and her skin is made from lilies and carnations and her teeth—

‘She hasn’t got any teeth, for Christ’s sake!’ Vinny snapped.

She’s a little May bud. A new leaf. I might call her Mayblossom, Eliza laughed her gurgling laugh that set everyone’s nerves on edge.

‘No you bloody won’t,’ said the Widow.

Rock-a-bye-baby, Eliza sang, on the tree-top, and whispered the baby’s name in its petal-ear. Is-o-bel, a peal of bells. Isobel Fairfax. Now the baby’s life could begin. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.

‘Isobel?’ snorted the very unmerry Widow, and then was unable to think of anything else to say.

Darling, Eliza wrote to Gordon, you’d better come home soon or I’m going to kill your bloody family.

Life in the ever-after wasn’t as happy as it should have been. Life, in fact, was a bloody bore, Eliza, hissing, we have to get a place of our own, at every opportunity. To Gordon. Gordon was no longer a hero, no longer flying in skies of any colour. He’d wrapped himself in his long white apron again and turned himself back into a grocer. Eliza was disappointed with this civilian transformation. The Widow, needless to say, was delighted.

A grocer, Eliza said as if the word itself was distasteful. ‘Well, what did you expect him to do?’ the Widow snapped. ‘It’s what he was born to,’ she added grandly as if Gordon were the prince-in-waiting to some vast grocery empire.

Gordon was still a hero to Charles, especially when he did magic tricks for him, learned in the idle hours when he was waiting to scramble into the air. He knew how to take coins from Charles’ fingers and make eggs appear from behind the Widow’s ears. He was particularly good at disappearing tricks. When he worked his magic on the Widow she said, ‘Oh Gordon,’ in the same tone that Eliza said, Oh Charles, when Charles did something that amused her.

Eliza watched the Widow sweep up leaves on the back lawn. The Widow brushed furiously at birch and sycamore and apple, but the leaves were coming down like rain and every time she managed to make a pile the wind whisked them up in the air again. She might as well try to sweep the stars from the sky. ‘I wish she’d just let us play in them,’ Charles said glumly and Eliza laughed, Play? The word’s not even in the old hag’s vocabulary.

Charles and Isobel pasted dead leaves into a scrap-book, with glue that smelt of fish (Vinny’s blood, Eliza informed them). Charles wrote the name of the tree beneath each leaf – sycamore and ash, oak and willow. The leaves had been salvaged from the Widow or scavenged off the pavements when Eliza and Isobel walked Charles home from school in the afternoons.

From the horse chestnuts on Chestnut Avenue they’d collected handfuls of the spiky green seed-pods that looked like medieval weapons and Eliza had shown them how to open them, splitting one with her sharp red fingernails, peeling back the soft white shawl around the brown chestnut inside, saying, You’re the first person in the world to see that.

Gordon stood in the doorway and laughed, ‘Not quite the same thing as discovering Niagara, Lizzy,’ and then he offered to take Charles away for a manly tutorial on soaking conkers in vinegar, because it turned out that they really were medieval weapons, but before he could, Eliza threw a handful of unpeeled chestnuts at Gordon’s head and he said, very coldly, to her, ‘Let’s have a bit of peace in this house for a change, shall we, Lizzy?’

Eliza made a face at his retreating back and when he’d gone said, Peace, ha! There’ll be no peace in this house until that old hag is dead and in her coffin and six feet under. ‘Six feet under what?’ Charles asked. Charles had got glue all over him, a big leaf was stuck to his elbow. Why, under the bed, of course, Eliza said breezily as she glimpsed Vinny in the hall.

‘There are leaves everywhere,’ Vinny complained, coming into the room. ‘It’s worse in here than it is outside.’ The leaves drove her out of the room again and she went to find out where Vera had got to with the tea-tray, oblivious to the rowan leaf, complete with its scarlet berries, that had attached itself to her salt-sprinkled grey hair like a strange botanical barrette.

‘Moan, moan, moan,’ Charles whispered. ‘Why doesn’t she like us?’ Charles’ mission in life was to make people laugh but he’d set himself a hard task with Vinny.

She doesn’t like anyone, she doesn’t even like herself, Eliza scoffed.

‘She doesn’t even live here,’ Charles muttered, but was cheered by the sight of Vera slouching in with a tray piled high with tea and buttered toast, Eccles cakes and the Widow’s apricot tea loaf. God, Eliza said, sucking hard on a cigarette, cake, cake, bloody cake, that’s all you get in this house.

‘Sounds all right to me,’ Charles said.

After tea Eliza got out the fat wax crayons and colouring books for them on the dining-room table. Eliza was a generous art critic, everything her children did was absolutely wonderful. At the other end of the table, the Widow said something indistinct. She was sitting with her glasses perched on the end of her nose, turning collars and cuffs (‘waste not want not’). Eliza told Isobel that she should be an artist when she grew up. ‘That won’t put food on the table,’ the Widow said. ‘And you be careful with those crayons, Charles.’

Eliza said nothing, but if you were close enough to her, you could hear the voodoo words she was incanting under her breath, like a swarm of bees. The Widow wiped the crumbs of cake from her fingerbones and left the table.

Charles bent over his drawing, frowning in concentration. He was drawing clumsy ideal homes – square houses with pitch roofs and window-eyes and mouth-doors. Isobel drew a tree with golden-red leaves and Gordon came in and said, ‘Oh Margaret, are you grieving over goldengrove unleaving’ and gave her his increasingly sad smile and without looking at him Eliza said, She really is rather good, isn’t she? and gave Isobel a radiant, intimate smile that cut out Gordon.

Gordon laughed and said, ‘We should have more, you never know what they might turn out to be – Shake-speares and Leonardo da Vincis.’

‘More what?’ Charles asked without taking his eyes off the sun he was drawing, a big golden-spoked eye.

More nothing, Eliza said dismissively.

‘Babies,’ Gordon said to Charles. ‘We should have another baby.’

Eliza pushed a lock of hair out of Isobel’s eyes and said, Whatever for? Gordon and Eliza had whole conversations now using intermediaries.

‘Because that’s what people do,’ Gordon said, turning Charles’ drawing round as if he was looking at it, although it was obvious he wasn’t. ‘People who love each other, anyway.’ But then he must have come under the influence of Eliza’s silent hoodoo because he suddenly left the room as well. It was all exits and entrances these days in Arden.

‘Where do you get babies from?’ Charles asked, after he’d finished his picture with two birds flying through the sky like dancing Vs.

Eliza flicked open her gold lighter and lit a cigarette. ‘From the baby shop, of course.’

The origin of babies was a confusing issue in Arden. According to the Widow, they were delivered by storks, but Vinny’s version had them being left under goose-berry bushes. Eliza’s answer seemed much more reasonable. Especially as there was a whole row of gooseberry bushes in the back garden and no baby had ever appeared under any of them. And as for storks, they didn’t even live in this country – according to Gordon – so it was hard to see how English children (let alone Welsh or Scottish) could ever get born at all.

The Widow came back into the room and gave a cursory glance at their drawings. ‘Trees have green leaves,’ she said to Isobel, ‘not red,’ as if she had never opened her Widowed window-eyes and looked at autumn.

Children, Eliza said irritably after the Widow left the room, why would anyone want children? I wish I’d never had any of the damn things, so annoyed that one of the wax crayons snapped in two in her hands.

‘But you love us, don’t you?’ Charles asked, a worried look on his face. Eliza started to laugh, a weird swooping noise, and said, Good God, of course I do. I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for you.

Eliza spent her autumn days lying on the wicker lounger in the conservatory, wearing her sunglasses as if she was on the beach, even though the skies were dull, reading library books and drinking whisky and smoking cigarette after cigarette until the conservatory was full of a hazy blue fug. The Widow’s cacti looked unhappy. So did the Widow.

‘Lizzy,’ Gordon said, at his most reasonable, persuasive, cajoling. Helpless. ‘Lizzy, don’t you think you could help out around the house a bit more? Vera has all on looking after us all and Mother does nothing but cook.’

My hands are full with the children, Eliza said, without taking her eyes off her book. Although as far as Gordon could see her hands were full with a cigarette and a large whisky and the children were sliding noisily down the stairs on tea-trays.

In the autumnal evenings, when the children were in bed, Gordon and Eliza and the Widow sat round the coal fire in the front room listening to the wireless or playing cards. The Widow suspected Eliza of cheating but couldn’t prove it. (Yet.) Sometimes Gordon just sat and stared at the fire while the Widow put her scratchy records on the old-fashioned wind-up gramophone.

The Widow made a fuss about giving Gordon supper. ‘He needs looking after,’ she said pointedly to Eliza, as she cut him a piece of last year’s Christmas cake and put a windmill-sail of Wensleydale on the top. Oh God, Eliza muttered to the George the Third chandelier, they even have the bloody stuff with cheese. ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ the Widow said, in her grand northern duchess voice, ‘Did you want some, Eliza?’

While Gigli sang ‘Che Gelida Manina’ on the old wind-up, the Widow poured tea into flower-sprigged cups. Eliza took her tea without milk or sugar and every time the Widow poured her a cup she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know how you can!’ and crumpled up her white paper face.

Through a mouthful of cake, Gordon made the mistake of making a joke, for his mother’s benefit, about how Eliza never made cakes and Eliza looked at him through half-closed eyes and said, No, but then I do fuck you, so that Gordon sloshed his tea into his saucer and started to choke on his old Christmas cake. The Widow smiled the bright, polite smile of the partially deaf and said, ‘What was that? What did she say?’

By November, the trees on the streets were almost bare apart from, here and there, a stray leaf that lingered, flapping like a mournful flag, and there were no more leaves to collect when Charles went to and from Rowan Street Primary School. Charles hated school. Charles hated school so much that he couldn’t eat his breakfast in the morning.

The Widow’s philosophy of child nutrition was simple – as much as possible at every opportunity. She paid particular attention to breakfast and insisted Charles and Isobel ate porridge, eggs, poached or boiled, toast and marmalade and drank half a pint of milk from big glass tumblers. They’ll blow up like balloons, Eliza said, breakfasting on her usual cigarettes and black coffee. ‘You’ll waste away to nothing,’ the Widow said accusingly to her and Charles looked up in alarm from his egg. Eliza did look thin, but surely she couldn’t get so thin that she disappeared?

Charles was wiped clean of his marmalade (rather roughly by the Widow, with an old flannel) and hustled into his blazer and cap. His fat lower lip started to tremble and he said, very quietly, in Eliza’s direction, ‘I don’t want to go to school, Mummy.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ the Widow said sharply, ‘everyone has to go to school.’ Rowan Street Primary was a dark cramped place that smelt of wet gabardine and plimsoll rubber and was staffed by sour-faced spinsters who must all have been found under the same gooseberry bush as Vinny. An extraordinary amount of physical violence took place within its brick walls – Charles came home with reports of daily floggings, canings and whippings (thankfully on other boys so far) perpetrated by the headmaster, Mr Baxter. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him being a stern disciplinarian,’ the Widow said, mercilessly strapping Charles’ huge leather satchel on to his small shoulders. ‘Little boys are naughty and they have to find out what’s what.’

Oh, and big boys too, Eliza said in her affected drawl, dragging hard on her cigarette and staring through narrowed eyes at Gordon, eating the Widow’s full cooked breakfast. I often show Gordon what’s what, don’t I, darling? Eliza smiled like a cat in the sun and the Widow turned the colour of her home-pickled red cabbage and looked as if she’d like to brain Eliza with the big chrome teapot that always formed the centre-piece of the table. Gordon stoically ignored all of this and, standing up, he took a triangle of fried bread from his unfinished plate and said, ‘Come on, old chap,’ (being an officer in the war had influenced his previously plebeian vocabulary) ‘I’ll give you a lift to school in the car.’ Forced to accept the inevitable, a halo of doom hovered over poor Charles’ striped cap. When he went over to Eliza to kiss her goodbye, she whispered fiercely in his ear, You tell me if Mr Baxter ever lays a finger on you and I’ll rip his head off and pull his lungs out through his neck. If there was one person in the world more frightening than Mr Baxter it was Eliza.

Christmas afforded two weeks of respite for Charles and he spent many patiently maladroit hours making paper chains and fashioning decorations out of silver milk bottle tops. Lovely, darling, Eliza said, garlanding herself with a chain of milk bottle tops under the mistaken impression that Charles had made her a necklace.

Gordon drove into the country and came back with an enormous fir tree, stuffed into the boot of the big black car, its roots still clagged with soil. Eliza stroked its branches tenderly as if it were a wild animal and said, Smell that, and they breathed in the scent of coldness and pine resin and something even more mysterious. Gordon tamed it by putting it in an old barrel wrapped in Christmas paper and stringing it with tiny coloured lanterns.

Eliza made little dwarves from tissue and crêpe, their tissue-paper faces had crayon smiles drawn on hastily and match-heads for eyes. Their pipe-cleaner arms and legs clung for dear life onto the tree. Sweet, aren’t they? Eliza said to everyone, delighted with her handiwork and no-one had the heart to tell her how dreadful they were.

For Christmas, Gordon gave Eliza a Victorian gypsy ring – gold with little emerald and diamond starbursts. Eliza held it against her pale cheek and said, Does it suit me? to Charles. The Widow viewed Eliza through hooded hawk eyes, angry at the thought of how much the ring had cost her baby boy. She handed over her own dull and dutiful mother-in-law present – a boxed set of monogrammed handkerchiefs.

Gordon had bought Charles a magic set which was far too old for him. ‘You bought that for yourself really,’ Vinny said, as prickly as pine needles. (Vinny had not been herself since peace was declared.) Make her disappear, won’t you, darling? Eliza whispered (loudly) to Gordon.

The Widow carved the Christmas pork, a paper crown askew on her bun of grey hair, and Gordon proposed a toast to the future, in French wine, and Eliza gave Charles and Isobel a glass of watered-down wine. The Widow sipped at her glass of blood-red wine and said, ‘Liberty Hall here – we all know that, don’t we?’

Summer came in and brought with it new next-door neighbours. The old people who’d lived in Sherwood since it was built died within a week of each other and the house was sold to a Mr Baxter. The very same Mr Baxter – to Charles’ unending horror – who was the headmaster at Rowan Street Primary. It did seem particularly unfair that Charles, after dodging Mr Baxter all day at school, wasn’t even safe in his own house and garden. Charles was fated – whenever he kicked a ball it had to end up on Mr Baxter’s side of the fence, whenever he chose to shout at the top of his lungs, which with Charles was frequently, it was Mr Baxter who was snoozing in a deck-chair on the other side of the privet.

There was a shy Mrs Baxter too. Younger than her husband and built to motherly specifications – short and soft with no hard edges, unlike bony Mr Baxter. Mrs Baxter changed the name of her house, getting the man who did odd-jobs for the Widow to take down the brass plate on the gate that said ‘Sherwood’ and replace it with a wooden one with the word ‘Sithean’ carved into it. ‘Waste of good brass,’ was the Widow’s opinion, though whether she meant metal or money was unclear.

‘She-ann’, Mrs Baxter explained to the Widow, was a Scottish word. Mrs Baxter was Scottish too and had a lovely accent, peat and heather and soft sandstone houses.

The Baxters had a daughter – Audrey – the same age as Isobel. Audrey was ‘a timid little thing’ (according to the Widow) with hair the colour of falling maple leaves and eyes the colour of doves’ wings. Mr Baxter was very strict with both Audrey and Mrs Baxter. How awful other people’s families are, yawned Eliza.

The Widow didn’t respond enthusiastically to Mrs Baxter’s neighbourly overtures – she believed in keeping yourself to yourself. Who else would want her? Eliza said, lying in her swimming-costume on a rug on the grass, her long thin limbs looking incredibly pale as if they’d never seen the light before.

There were very few people that the Widow wished for neighbourhood intercourse with. The Lovats were one of the few families she courted (‘Invite that little Malcolm home,’ she said to Charles, bribing him with barley sugar). She had an unnatural respect for the medical profession and no qualms about gynaecologists, never having had women’s trouble.

Gordon came home one day and said, ‘How about a holiday then?’ and Eliza said, Not with her. And so just the four of them went to the seaside and stayed in a boarding-house where they were summoned down to the evening meal by the landlady beating a copper gong in the hallway and Gordon made the same joke every time about J. Arthur Rank until Eliza said, For Christ’s sake, Gordon, put a sock in it, will you? and then he didn’t make the joke any more.

Gordon hired a beach hut from the line of primary colours that stretched along the promenade and devoted his time to building spectacular sandcastles. Charles had to wear a floppy cotton sun hat like a baby because his redhead’s skin burnt so easily. ‘Was there anyone in your family with red hair then?’ Gordon asked, unusually snide, but Eliza just stared at him from behind her impenetrable sunglassed eyes.

They buried Eliza in the sand. She sat unconcerned, reading a book and occasionally looking at her children over the top of her sunglasses and smiling. (You’ve got me prisoner!) She wore a glamorous red halter-neck swimming-costume and the hot sunshine they had all week turned her white skin a deep exotic colour.

In the evenings, Eliza and Gordon went walking along the prom, Eliza dressed in one of her expensive dresses. And when they came back to their room Gordon unzipped her out of her dress and undid her necklace and ran his fingers over her warm brown skin and buried his face in her dark, dark hair until she laughed and said, Sorry, darling, the baby shop’s closed, and Gordon said how come she was a slut with everyone but him? And Eliza laughed.

I’m going for a walk, Eliza said, getting up suddenly from her deck-chair, don’t anybody follow me, she said in a warning voice when Gordon started to get up. I’m suffocating.

She was wearing a red cotton skirt over her red swimming-costume and she’d hitched the skirt up high on one side so that men, sitting dutifully on the beach with their wives and children, turned their heads slyly to follow Eliza’s lazy gypsy progress along the shoreline. At one point she bent down to pick something up and examine it before wandering on her way.

She walked a long way, until she was just a distant flame of red at the extremity of vision. By the time she wandered back the sun was no longer hot and the tide was lapping at sandcastles all along the beach.

‘I thought you were never coming back,’ Gordon said when Eliza finally returned. She ignored him and put her hand out to Charles, saying, Look what I found, handing him a big spiral shell, its outside a rough calciferous white but its inside a shiny satin-pink, the colour of a baby’s insides, Eliza said, and Gordon said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Lizzy.’

Eliza lit a cigarette and watched as a wave crept up to her thin brown feet, with their toes painted the colour of holly berries.

‘Come on then,’ Gordon said to Charles and Isobel, ‘J. Arthur Rank’s going to be calling us any minute and we don’t want to miss our tea, do we?’

They climbed the pebble-dash concrete steps up to the promenade but Eliza stayed where she was, the waves lapping her ankles by now. ‘Bloody Queen Canute,’ said Gordon, who didn’t usually swear, ‘let her bloody drown.’ But Charles cried out at this idea and ran back to drag Eliza by the hand.

‘You could make a friend of her,’ Gordon said to Eliza as they looked down on Mrs Baxter in her garden, ‘she’s not that much older than you.’ They were standing in the attic bedroom but Charles and Isobel weren’t in it, they were in the bath being supervised by the Widow who was pretending to be a U-boat captain so that Charles’ fleet of little boats could destroy her. Gordon stood behind Eliza, his arms round her waist and his head resting on her shoulder. Eliza was trying to ignore his head on her shoulder, trying not to flinch and push him off.

Mrs Baxter was attacking the long-neglected grass in Sithean’s garden, leaning all her weight on the handle of the push-and-pull lawnmower and stopping every few minutes to untwine the long wet grass stalks from the roller. The smell of grass clippings invaded the hot attic room. ‘She shouldn’t be doing that in her condition,’ Gordon said (Mrs Baxter was pregnant), a frown of concern on his face. Mr Baxter came out and said something to his wife. ‘He’s a funny so-and-so,’ Gordon said. Eliza backed away from the window, backed into Gordon who encircled her waist with his arms and started walking her backwards, like a prisoner, to Charles’ little bed until Eliza jabbed her elbow hard into his ribs and kicked him with her heel on his shin, so that he fell back on the bed in surprise and pain.

Gordon lay on the bed for a long time listening to the sound of the German fleet being destroyed (‘Achtung! Achtung!’ the drowning Widow screamed) and the noise of Mrs Baxter’s lawnmower clattering in the evening air. He listened to the sound of the front door banging shut. Eliza went out all the time in these long summer evenings. Where to? Just out.

‘An Indian summer,’ the Widow announced. It was September and all the leaves on the trees were turning an old green colour. Charles and Isobel had both had the chickenpox and Charles hadn’t started the new school year yet, Isobel wasn’t due to start for another year. ‘They’re as fit as fiddles!’ Vinny declared crossly whenever she encountered them.

Breakfast was always a difficult time of the day. The Widow was at her most officious, Eliza at her most indolent. ‘You’ll be glad when Charles is back in school,’ the Widow said over a particularly fraught breakfast-table. The September morning sun was spreading itself like butter on the Widow’s white linen tablecloth. ‘When they’re both in school, come to that!’ the Widow pursued, borrowing one of Vinny’s exclamation marks. Gordon was still upstairs, shaving, scraping carefully at his handsome throat with an open razor.

Will I? Eliza said, carelessly flicking open her cigarette lighter. She inhaled deeply and said that if it was up to her she wouldn’t bother sending her children to school at all. She hadn’t put her make-up on yet and her face looked scrubbed and clean and with her hair scraped back in a ribbon, her Eskimo cheekbones were suddenly obvious.

‘Well, it’s a good job that it’s not up to you then, isn’t it?’ the Widow snapped. Eliza didn’t reply, except to raise one indolent eyebrow and butter a slice of toast – the kind of response that made the Widow’s blood boil. (‘She makes my blood boil,’ she muttered to Vinny, pushing the old wooden Ewbank over the living-room carpet as if she was trying to mow it out of existence. Vinny, following her with duster and polish, had an unnerving vision of blood boiling up merrily in her mother’s retort-body. The Widow didn’t look as if her blood was boiling, she looked as if it was congealing with cold.)

‘What would you do with them if they didn’t go to school?’ the Widow pursued, driven by curiosity to prolong this conversation, when on the whole she would rather she never had to speak to Eliza at all.

Oh, I don’t know, Eliza said carelessly, blowing a small, perfect smoke ring for Charles’ delight. She twisted a black ringlet, escaped from its ribbon fetter, around her finger and smiled at Charles. She was wearing an old paisley silk dressing-gown of Gordon’s and a nightdress fancy enough to go dancing in – a long lace body and a bias-cut skirt in oyster satin – and she looked so slovenly beautiful that Gordon, standing unnoticed in the doorway of the dining-room, felt his heart clenching. I’d set them loose in a big green field somewhere, Eliza said finally, and let them run around all day long.

‘What a lot of rot,’ the Widow rat-a-tat-tatted back.

Isobel’s porridge was a little island, grey and lumpy like melted brains, floating in a pond of milk. She dug her spoon into the middle of the oatmeal island and imagined being in Eliza’s big green field. She could see herself, a tiny little figure in the middle of an ocean of green. ‘Are you going to eat your food or play with it?’ the Widow asked sternly.

Don’t speak to my child like that, Eliza said, standing up and pushing her chair back as if she was about to attack the Widow with the butter knife. The shoulder of her dressing-gown had slipped down, exposing a naked shoulder and the northern hemisphere of one smooth round breast, rising out of the thicket of lace. Eliza’s skin was flawless, it made Charles think of the creamy junket the Widow made but without the nutmeg freckles that he’d been sprinkled with. ‘Look at you, you slut,’ the Widow hissed at Eliza and Isobel curled her toes up tightly and ate her porridge as fast as she could.

‘What’s going on?’ Gordon asked, walking into the middle of the room. Gordon’s shirt (starched white by the Widow) and his newly shaved face seemed so fresh and unsullied that they shamed the breakfast table into a truce.

Gordon suddenly plucked Isobel out of her chair – spoon still in hand – and tossed her up so high that for a moment it looked as if she might not come down again. ‘You’ll hang her on the lampshade if you’re not careful,’ the Widow reproached. Vinny came in, hatted and handbagged ready for work. ‘She’ll wet herself,’ she warned. You wouldn’t think she had a house of her own, Eliza said loudly, the amount of time she spends here.

Gordon put Isobel back in her chair and said to the Widow, ‘Wouldn’t it be dreadful if anyone had any fun in this house?’ and she said, ‘There’s no need to talk like that, Gordon.’ Vinny couldn’t resist chipping in with her two pennies’ worth. ‘Fun, Gordon,’ she sneered, ‘doesn’t get the washing done.’

‘What the bloody hell does that mean, Vinny?’ Gordon said, turning on her aggressively, and because she couldn’t think of a reply she sat down at the breakfast-table and poured herself a cup of tea.

Oh darling, Eliza cooed, walking over to Gordon and pressing the full length of her satin-and-lace body against him, so that Vinny put her hand over Charles’ eyes. Eliza slipped her hands round Gordon’s waist and, undercover of his jacket, tugged the shirt and vest out of his trousers and ran the flat of her hands over his bare back all the way up to his shoulder-blades so that he let out an involuntary, embarrassing moan. Vinny and the Widow were the mirrors of each other’s disgust. Vinny’s mouth puckered like a carp as she secretly mouthed the word ‘whore’ to the teapot.

Eliza stood on tiptoe and whispered in Gordon’s ear, her curls tickling his cheek, her voice like burning sugar, Darling, if we don’t get a place of our own soon, then I’m going to leave you. Understand?

Mrs Baxter lost her baby. (‘How can you lose a baby?’ Charles asked in horror. Quite easily, if you try hard enough, darling, Eliza laughed.) She went to the hospital suddenly one night. Mr Baxter came round to Arden, dragging Audrey by the hand and asked the Widow if she would look after her. The Widow could hardly refuse and Gordon brought Audrey upstairs and tucked her into bed next to Isobel. Audrey was very quiet and said nothing beyond, ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodnight’ but snored very gently, like a kitten.

Mrs Baxter’s baby was early, too early, and died before it even saw daylight. ‘Stillborn,’ the Widow said over a breakfast of poached eggs and Gordon said, ‘Ssh,’ and gestured at Audrey. But Audrey was too concerned with trying to stop her poached egg slipping off the plate to notice.

Later, when Audrey had gone home, Charles asked what stillborn meant and Vinny said, ‘Dead,’ in her usual no-nonsense way. She was helping herself to toast while waiting for a lift to work. ‘Where do dead babies go?’ Charles asked. Vinny wasn’t fazed for a second, ‘In the ground,’ and the Widow tut-tutted at the directness of this statement. ‘Heaven, of course,’ she placated, ‘babies go to heaven, and become cherubs.’ Charles looked at Eliza for confirmation. They never really believed anything anyone said if Eliza didn’t verify it. Back to the baby shop to be repaired, she said, to annoy Vinny and the Widow.

‘And if you don’t get a move on for school, Charles,’ the Widow crowed, ‘you might find that you get sent back to the baby shop and get changed for another model!’ Gloating at this finesse, the Widow gave Eliza a triumphant smile and swept out of the dining-room. Eliza narrowed her eyes and lit a cigarette. One day, she said, one day I’m going to kill the old bitch.

‘We really will have to get a place of our own,’ Gordon ventured to his mother. The Widow was in the kitchen making pastry for a Sunday plum pie with plums from her own Victorias, a great china bowl of them was sitting on the kitchen table. A wasp crawled slowly over the red fruit, dizzy with plum fumes. The Widow folded her arms, propping up her scrawny bosom and got flour on her blouse. Much as she would like to get rid of Eliza, when it came to it she couldn’t bear the idea of Gordon (‘my son’) leaving home. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ she said, ‘not when I’ve got so much room – and you wouldn’t get looked after without me – and anyway this house is going to be yours one day, Gordon. One day very soon,’ she added with a little catch in her voice. She lifted her apron to dab at her eyes and Gordon said, ‘There, there,’ and put his arms round her.

Eliza lay coldly in bed next to Gordon. The second-best bed. The sheets in Arden were as stiff as brown paper. She spoke over her icy shoulder at him, Look at her – why doesn’t she move out and live with Vinny and give us this house, or give us some money from the shop? The shop should be yours, she’s an old woman, why is she hanging on to it? We could sell up and have some money, get away from this bloody hole. Do something with our lives.

This was the most Eliza had said to Gordon in months. He stared through the dark at the wall opposite, if he stared hard enough at the wallpaper he could make out where the repeat began on the pattern of roses growing on a trellis. An owl hooted on Sycamore Street.

The Widow creaked stiffly into the front passenger seat of the big black car.

‘It’s half-day closing,’ Gordon said to Charles, ‘I’ll be back at lunchtime.’ Vinny climbed resentfully into the back – ‘How is it that I always have to sit in the back? Why am I always second-best?’ – and they all drove off to turn themselves into licensed grocers for the day, prut-prut-prut. Charles waved until the car was out of sight – and then a little bit longer because one of Gordon’s tricks was to pretend to have disappeared round a corner and then just when you thought he’d gone he’d suddenly pop back. Not this time though.

A picnic, Eliza said, stubbing her cigarette out on one of the Widow’s flower-sprigged plates, it’s half-term, after all, and we’ve done absolutely bloody nothing all week, and she hauled the old wicker picnic basket out of its hiding-place in the understairs cupboard and said, We’ll take the bus into town and meet Daddy at lunchtime and give him a surprise.

As a treat they sat on the top deck of the bus, on the front seats, and watched the streets of trees go sailing by below. The big branch of a sycamore snapped unexpectedly against the window in front of them, rattling its dead leaves that were like hands and Eliza said, It’s all right, it’s just a tree, and lit a cigarette. She waved the smoke away from their faces and crossed her legs and tapped one foot as if she was impatient about something. She was wearing Charles’ favourite shoes, high-heeled brown suede with little furry pom-poms. Mink according to Eliza. Her fifteen-denier stockings were the same shade. Mink.

The bus trundled on, running along the street where Vinny’s house was. Eliza stubbed out her cigarette under her shoe, twisting her foot hard, long after the cigarette was extinguished. Her bad mood radiated off her like the cold October sunshine. There was a bus-stop right outside Vinny’s door and all three of them looked down into her tiny front garden and tried to peer through her lace-curtained windows, safe because they knew she was at work. Their faces were level with her bedroom window but its curtains were permanently shut against nosy top-deckers and it revealed no secrets to voyeurs. Vinny’s house was a thin redbrick semi with a small, square bay and a mean porch, built when the master-builder’s imagination had run out and his veins were flooded with alcohol (the master-builder’s solid trunk was felled by a stroke in 1930).

Ugh, Eliza shivered, although whether at the house or its absent occupant wasn’t clear. Both probably. Charles and Isobel didn’t like visiting Vinny’s house. It smelt of damp and Izal and boiled vegetables.

When they arrived at the shop they found the Widow standing by the scratched red-metal Hobart coffee-grinder dreaming about money and things coming off ration. Gordon lifted Isobel on to the polished mahogany of the counter so she could watch him weighing tea. The tea smelt dark and bitter like the Widow’s hot chrome teapot with its knitted green and yellow cosy. Vinny was cutting a piece of Lancashire as white as the Widow’s skin.

‘Well, well, well,’ Mrs Tyndale, a regular customer, said, bustling fatly into the shop, ‘if it isn’t Charles and Isobel.’ She turned to the Widow, ‘She’s the image of her mother, isn’t she?’ and the Widow and Vinny raised their eyebrows in unison, communicating mutely with each other over the ramifications of this statement. ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it,’ Mrs Tyndale said, ‘to see a happy young family!’

Eliza didn’t respond in any way and disappeared into the back of the shop, followed by Gordon on an invisible lead. Mrs Tyndale leant conspiratorially over the counter and said to Vinny, ‘Flighty thing, isn’t she?’ Vinny gave a funny squint smile and whispered, ‘Flirty, too,’ as if Eliza was some strange species of bird.

Eliza and Gordon reappeared, their faces tight and blank as if they’d been having an argument. We’re going for a picnic, we’ll give you a lift home first, Eliza said to the Widow. The Widow demurred. She was going to Temple’s for lunch, she said, looking saintly, as if she was going to a church service, as if Temple’s might really be a temple, not a department store restaurant. ‘A picnic in October?’ Mrs Tyndale enquired brightly and was ignored by everyone.

Eliza picked Isobel up from the counter and started nibbling her ear. Why, Vinny wondered, was Eliza always trying to eat bits of her children? What a tasty little morsel, Eliza murmured in Isobel’s ear while Vinny patted butter aggressively, imagining it was Eliza’s head. If Eliza wasn’t careful, Vinny thought, she’d look around one day and discover that she’d eaten them all up.

The Widow, meanwhile, was wondering if this picnic was perhaps another of Eliza’s impulsive outings. Perhaps she’d come back with another baby. Or perhaps, with any luck, she’d get lost and not come back at all. Vinny slapped a lump of butter down on the marble slab, they would never think of asking her on a picnic, would they? Vinny, Eliza’s voice purred sweetly, why don’t you come with us? and Vinny recoiled in horror – the last thing she wanted to do was go anywhere with them, she just wanted to be asked. ‘Yes, do,’ the Widow barked, ‘some fresh air might put a bit of life in you.’ Poor Vinny, Eliza said, fizzing with laughter.

It was quite a relief to see Eliza cheerful, even if it was only for a moment. She’d been bad-tempered for weeks. I’m not myself, she said and then laughed maniacally, but God knows who I am.

Gordon unwrapped himself from his grocer’s bondage with a flourish and put his gabardine mac and trilby hat on so that he didn’t look anything like a grocer. He could have been a film star with his thick, wavy hair. He stood at the door of the shop and raised his arms to play Oranges and Lemons and said, ‘Off with her head!’ and Isobel ran under the half-arch of his arms. Charles got excited and ran back three times to be executed. Gordon was just about to chop off Eliza’s head as well when she said – very coldly, very Hempstid – Stop it, Gordon, and he gave her an odd look and then clicked his heels and said, ‘Jawohl, meine dame,’ and Vinny snapped, ‘That’s not funny, Gordon – people died in the war, you know!’ Eliza laughed and said, No, really, Vinny? and Gordon turned to her nastily and said, ‘Shut up, why don’t you, Eliza?’

I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Eliza said airily and Gordon stared at her very hard and said, ‘Don’t you?’

The shop bell clanged noisily on its springy strip of metal as Gordon pulled the door shut behind them. The Widow and Mrs Tyndale stood behind the glass in the upper half of the shop door and waved goodbye to the car, woodenly like Punch and Judy in their box. As soon as the engine started to prut-prut-prut they turned to each other, eager to comment on the behaviour of their not-so-happy young family.

‘Where shall we go?’ Gordon asked no-one in particular, tapping the steering-wheel with his leather-gloved hands as if it was a tambourine. Anywhere, Eliza said, lighting a cigarette. Gordon gave her an odd sideways look as if he’d only just met her and was wondering what kind of a person she was. ‘How about Boscrambe Woods?’ he asked, looking at Charles in the rear-view mirror. ‘Yes!’ Charles shouted enthusiastically. Eliza said something but Gordon accelerated noisily as he pulled away from the pavement and her words were drowned by the engine.

Vinny, relegated to the back seat as usual, was trying to shrink to protect herself from carelessly kicking feet and sticky hands. ‘What do you think, Vin?’ Gordon said and Vinny said, ‘What – you mean someone’s actually asking my opinion for once?’ and lit a cigarette without giving an opinion any way and disappeared in a cloud of tobacco smoke.

Isobel closed her eyes almost as soon as the engine started. She loved the feeling of slipping down into sleep, breathing in the soporific drug of seat-leather, nicotine, petrol and Eliza’s perfume. They were still driving when she woke up. Eliza looked over her shoulder and said, Nearly there. Isobel’s tongue felt like a pebble. Charles was picking a scab on his knee. His face was covered in freckles and the tiny elliptical craters of chickenpox scars. His snub nose twitched at the amount of cigarette smoke in the car. Gordon started to sing ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ in his nice light baritone. In profile his nose was straight and Roman and from low down on the leather of the back seat you could imagine him flying his plane through the clouds. Occasionally, he cast a glance in Eliza’s direction as if he was checking to see if she was still there.

He braked suddenly as a thin stream of grey squirrel streaked across the road in front of the car and they all jerked forward. Vinny bounced her forehead off the back of the front seat with a little screech. ‘God,’ said Gordon, looking shaken, but Eliza just laughed her funny annoying laugh. Gordon stared at the windscreen for a while, a muscle in spasm in his cheek.

‘And are you all right, Vinny?’ Vinny asked herself, ‘Oh yes, thank you, don’t bother about me,’ she answered and was jerked violently again as Gordon revved up the engine and accelerated off.

The cold was a surprise after being in the heat of the car for so long, the clear woodland air a shock after the tobacco smog. Eliza turned up the collar of her camel coat and pulled on her delicate leather gloves. I should have worn a hat, she said as she bent down to tie Isobel’s scarf round her neck. Isobel could see a stray speck of mascara on Eliza’s cheek, beneath her lashes. Eliza tied the scarf so tight that it choked Isobel and she had to put her hands up and tug it looser.

The scarf matched her Shetland tammy, both knitted for Christmas by the Widow. Charles was wearing his school blazer and cap while Vinny had on her belted navy-blue gabardine with matching sou’wester. Anyone looking at them at that moment would have seen a nice family – healthy, attractive, ordinary – the kind that graced the advertisements every week in Picture Post. A nice ordinary family going for a walk in the woods. They would never have been able to tell, just by looking at them, that their world was about to end.

Eliza licked the edge of her Christmas present handkerchief and bent down again to wipe the corners of Isobel’s mouth. She rubbed so hard that Isobel was forced to take an involuntary step backwards. From somewhere above her head, Gordon’s voice sounded hollow, ‘Don’t rub so hard, Lizzy, you’ll rub her out,’ and she could see Eliza’s eyes narrowing and a thin blue vein on her forehead – the colour of hyacinths – grow visible through her fine skin and begin to throb. Eliza folded the handkerchief in a neat triangle and tucked it into the pocket of Isobel’s plaid wool coat and said, In case you need to blow your nose.

The picnic wasn’t a great success. Catering wasn’t one of Eliza’s skills. The cucumber in the fish-paste-and-cucumber sandwiches had made the bread soggy, the apples had rusting, mottled bruises under their skins and Eliza had neglected to pack anything to drink. By now they seemed to have walked a long way into the woods. ‘When you’re in a wood,’ Gordon said to Charles, ‘always follow the path, that way you won’t get lost.’ What if there isn’t a path? Eliza asked, bad temper sharpening her voice. ‘Then walk towards the light,’ Gordon said without turning to look at her.

Eliza had carried the big tartan rug from the back seat and spread it on a carpet of beech leaves. This is a lovely sunny patch, she said with a febrile gaiety that convinced no-one. Charles dropped to his knees and rolled about on the rug. Gordon leant back on his elbows and Isobel snuggled into the crook of his elbow. Eliza sat like a well-behaved aristocrat, her long, thin legs in their mink-coloured stockings and elegant shoes looking out of place, stretched across the homely tartan rug, as if they’d wandered in from a mannequin parade. Vinny cast them envious glances, her own scrawny legs had all the shape of clothes-pegs. Vinny forced her poker body to bend into a kneeling position on the rug and pulled her skirt over her legs; she had the air of a refined Victorian traveller amongst primitive forest dwellers.

The novelty of rug-dwelling soon wore off. The children shivered disconsolately and ate jam sandwiches and Kit-Kats until they felt queasy. ‘This isn’t much fun,’ Charles said and threw himself off the rug into a pile of leaves and started burying himself like a dog. Having fun was very important to Charles, having fun and making people laugh. ‘He’s just looking for attention,’ Vinny said. And he gets it – isn’t that clever? Eliza said. Charles’ hair was almost the same colour as the dying forest – tawny oak and curly copper-beech. He could have got lost in the pile of leaves and never be found until the spring.

Vinny heaved herself up from the rug with a struggle and said, ‘I have to go and you-know-what,’ and vanished into the trees. Minutes passed and she didn’t come back. Gordon laughed and said, ‘She’ll go for miles, to make sure nobody sees her bloomers,’ and Eliza made a nauseated face at the idea of Vinny’s underclothes and got up suddenly from the rug and said, I’m going for a walk, without looking at any of them and set off along the path, in the opposite direction to Vinny.

‘We’ll come with you!’ Gordon shouted after her and she spun round very quickly so that her big camel coat swung round her legs, showing her dress underneath in a swirl of green, and shouted back, Don’t you dare! She sounded furious. ‘She has completely the wrong shoes on,’ Gordon muttered angrily and bowled a rotten apple overarm into the trees behind them. Just before she disappeared round the turning in the path, Eliza stopped and shouted something, the words ringing clearly in the crisp air – I’m going home, don’t bother following me!

‘Home!’ Gordon exploded. ‘How does she think she’s to get home?’ and then he got up too and set off in pursuit of Eliza, shouting over his shoulder to Charles, ‘I won’t be a sec – stay here with your sister!’ and with that he was gone as well.

The sun had disappeared from the trees, except for one little pool at the corner of the rug. Isobel lay with her face in the warm pool, drifting in and out of sleep, eventually woken by Charles leaping on top of her. She screamed and the scream echoed wildly in the silence. They sat on the rug together, holding hands, waiting for some other noise to take the place of the dying echo of the scream, waiting for the sound of Gordon’s and Eliza’s voices, of a bird singing, of Vinny complaining, of wind in the trees, of anything except the absolute stillness of the wood. Perhaps it was one of Gordon’s disappearing tricks. One he was having difficulty with and any moment now he’d get it right and jump out from behind a tree and shout, ‘Surprise!’

A leaf the colour of Charles’ hair drifted down like a feather through the air and landed noiselessly. Isobel could feel fear, like hot liquid, in her stomach. Something was very, very wrong.

All sense of time had disappeared. It felt as if they’d been alone in the wood for hours. Where were Gordon and Eliza? Where was Vinny? Had she been eaten by a wild animal while doing you-know-what? Charles’ broad, jolly face had grown pale and pinched with worry. Eliza always told them that if they got separated from her when they were out then you must stay exactly where you are – and she would come and find them. Charles’ belief in this statement had waned considerably over the last hour or two.

Eventually he said, ‘Come on, let’s go and find everybody,’ and dragged Isobel up from the rug by her hand. ‘They’re just playing Hide-and-Seek probably,’ he said, but his whey-face and the wobble in his voice betrayed his real feelings. Being the grown-up in charge was taking its toll on him. They set off in the same direction that Eliza and Gordon had followed, the path quite clear – hard, trodden-down earth, laddered occasionally with tree-roots.

* * *

It was growing dark by now. Isobel stumbled over a tree-root snaking across the path and hurt her knees. Charles waited impatiently for her to catch up. He was holding something in his hand, squinting in the gloom. It was a shoe, a brown suede shoe, the heel bent at a strange angle and the little mink pom-pom dampened by something sticky so that it lay flat and limp like a wet kitten and the rhinestone was a dull gleam in the dying light.

Charles walked on more slowly now, carrying the shoe in his hand, then, without warning, he scuttled down into a dry ditch full of leaves, beside the path. The ditch was so full of leaves that they came up to Charles’ play-scarred knees and made an attractive crispy-crunchy noise as he waded through them. For a moment Isobel thought this might be part of his endless quest for fun but almost as soon as he’d leapt in, he leapt out the other side. She followed him, scrambling down into the ditch and wading through the leaves. She would like to have lain down, sunk on to this comfortable leaf bed and gone to sleep for a while, but Charles was charging on so she clambered up the other side of the ditch and hurried after him.

He was brushing his way through a curtain of twigs that snapped back and hit her in the face like thin whips. When she finally caught up with him he was standing as rooted as a tree with his back to her, as if he was playing statues, his arms sticking out from his body. In one hand he was holding the shoe. The fingers of the other hand were stretched out wide and flat and Isobel took hold of Charles’ sycamore leaf hand and together they stood and looked.

At Eliza. She was lolled against the trunk of a big oak tree, like a carelessly abandoned doll or a broken bird. Her head had flopped against her shoulder, stretching her thin white neck like a swan or a stalk about to snap. Her camel coat had fallen open and her woollen dress, the colour of bright spring leaves, was fanned out over her legs. She had one shoe off and one shoe on and the words to Diddle-diddle dumpling ran through Isobel’s head.

It was hard to know what to do with this sleeping mother who refused to wake up. She looked very peaceful, her long lashes closed, the speck of mascara still visible. Only the dark red ribbons of blood in her black curls hinted at the way her skull might have been smashed against the trunk of the tree and broken open like a beech-nut or an acorn.

They pulled her coat close and Charles did his best to put the shoe back on her elegantly arched stocking-foot. It was as if her feet had grown while she slept. It was so difficult getting the shoe back on that Charles grew afraid that he would break the bones in Eliza’s feet and eventually he gave up on the task and shoved the shoe into his blazer pocket.

They cuddled up to Eliza, trying to keep her warm, trying to keep themselves warm – one on each side of her like some sadly sentimental tableau (‘Won’t you wake up, Mother dear?’). Leaves drifted down occasionally. Three or four leaves were already snagged on Eliza’s black curls. Charles stood up and, dog-like, shook leaves off his own head. It was really quite dark now, it was all very well saying follow the light but what if there was no light to follow? When Isobel tried to stand up her legs were so numb that she could hardly balance and fell down again. And she was so hungry that for a dizzy moment she wanted to bite into the bark of the tree. But she would never do that because Eliza used to tell them a story called ‘The Oldest Tree In The Forest’ so that Isobel knew the bark of a tree was really its skin and she knew how painful a bite on your skin could be because Eliza was always biting them. And sometimes it hurt.

Charles said, ‘We have to find Daddy,’ his voice shrill in the quiet, ‘he’ll come and get Mummy.’ They looked doubtfully at Eliza, reluctant to leave her here all alone in the cold and the dark. Her cheeks were icy to the touch, they felt their own cheeks in comparison. If anything they were even colder. Charles started to gather up leaves and pile them over Eliza’s legs. They remembered the summer at the seaside, burying Eliza’s lower half in sand while she sat in her red halter-neck swimming-costume reading a book, wearing the sunglasses that made her look foreign and glamorous, and stubbing out her cigarettes in the sand turret they’d built around her (You’ve got me prisoner!). For a warm second Isobel could feel the sun on her shoulders and smell the sea. ‘Help me,’ Charles said and she shuffled leaves forward with her feet for Charles to scoop up in handfuls and throw on Eliza.

Then they kissed her, one on either cheek, in a strange reversal of the bedtime ritual. They left reluctantly, looking back at her several times. When they reached the ditch of leaves they turned round one last time but they couldn’t see Eliza any more, only a pile of dead leaves against a tree.

To go back to the tartan rug and abandoned picnic and wait for rescue? Or onward to try and find a way out of the wood? Charles said he wished they’d brought the uneaten sandwiches with them. ‘We could scatter the crumbs,’ he said, ‘and find our way back.’ Their only blueprint for survival in these circumstances, it seemed, was fictional. They knew the plot, unfortunately, and any minute expected to find the gingerbread cottage – and then the nightmare would really begin.

Isobel was sorry now that she’d ever complained about Eliza’s paste-and-cucumber, she wouldn’t be scattering them, she’d be eating them. She was so hungry that she would have eaten a gingerbread tile or a piece of striped candy window-frame, even though she knew the consequences. They were both suddenly very sorry for all the food that they’d ever left on their plates. They would even have eaten the Widow’s tapioca pudding. The big oval glass dish that the Widow made her milk-puddings in rose up before them like a mirage. They could feel the sliminess of the tapioca, taste the puddle of rosehip syrup that the Widow always poured in the middle, like a liquid jewel. Charles searched through his pockets and came up with a stringless conker, a farthing and a black-and-white striped humbug with a good deal of pocket-fluff attached. It was too hard to break so they took it in turns to suck it.

The wood was full of noises. Occasionally the darkness was shot through by strange sounds – screeches and whistles – that seemed to have no earthly origin. Twigs snapped and crackled and the undergrowth rustled malevolently as if something invisible was stalking them.

Every direction felt unsafe. An owl swept soundlessly on its flightpath, low over their heads, and Isobel was sure she could feel its claws touching her hair. She threw herself on the ground in a frenzy of panic that left Charles unmoved. ‘It’s just an owl, silly,’ he said, yanking her back up on to her feet. Her heart was ticking very fast as if it was about to go off. ‘It’s not the owls we have to worry about,’ Charles muttered grimly, ‘it’s the wolves,’ and then, remembering that he was supposed to be the man in charge of this woeful expedition, added, ‘Joke, Izzie – forget I said that.’

Moving on was slightly less terrifying than standing still waiting for something to pounce, so they soldiered on miserably. Isobel found some comfort in the warm grubbiness of Charles’ hand clasped around hers. Charles remembered a snatch of verse, It isn’t very good in the middle of the wood.

Tree after tree after tree, all the trees in the world were in Boscrambe Wood that night. In the middle of the night when there isn’t any light. Perhaps instead of letting them loose in her big green field, Eliza has chosen to set them free in an endless wood instead. Isobel thought she would have preferred it if she’d just returned them to the baby shop.

The path turned a corner and forked suddenly. Charles took the farthing out of his pocket and said, ‘Toss for it – heads right, tails left,’ in the manliest way he could muster and Isobel said, ‘Tails,’ in a weak voice. The coin landed wren-side up and the little bird pointed its beak at the left-hand path. As if on cue, the moon – full to bursting – dodged out from behind her cloud cover and hung over the left-hand path for a few brief seconds like a neon sign. ‘Follow the light,’ Charles said decisively.

The path was becoming overgrown, brambles reached out and plucked at their clothes and tweaked their hair like bird’s claws. It was so dark by now that it took them some time to realize they weren’t really on a path at all any more. A few steps further on and their Start-rite shoes began to be sucked into the ground. Everywhere that they tentatively poked their toes proved wet and boggy. They had heard stories of people being drowned in quicksand, sinking into bogs and they plunged on quickly through thorns to a higher and drier piece of ground.

‘Things can’t get any worse,’ Charles said miserably, just before the fog started to advance, wraithlike, towards them. It curled around the trees and grew thicker, like opaque water, wave after wave, engulfing everything in a ghostly white sea of fog. Isobel started to wail, very loudly, and Charles said, ‘Put a sock in it, Izzie. Please.’

Too weary to go any further, too confused by the fog, they curled up at the foot of a big tree, nestling in between its enormous roots, which arched over the ground like gnarled bony fingers. There were plenty of dead leaves here for a blanket but they remembered Eliza under her leaf cover and pulled their coats tighter. A cold counterpane of fog settled itself around them instead.

Isobel fell asleep immediately but Charles lay awake waiting for the wolves to start howling.

Isobel dreamt the strangest dream. She was in a great underground cavern, warm and full of people and noise. By the light of hundreds of candles she could see that the walls and the roof of the cavern were made of gold. At one end of this great hall a man sat on a throne. He was dressed all in green from head to foot and wore a golden band round his forehead. Someone handed her a silver plate piled high with the most delicious food, like nothing she’d ever tasted before. Someone else pressed a crystal goblet into her hand, full of a liquid that tasted of honey and raspberries, only nicer, and no matter how much she drank, the goblet was never empty. The people in the hall began to dance, sedately at first – but then the music grew more frantic and the dancing got wilder and wilder. The man with the golden band around his head appeared suddenly at her shoulder and shouted at her above the din, asking her what her name was and she shouted back, ‘Isobel!’ and immediately the hall – along with the lights and the music and the people – disappeared and she found herself alone in the wood, eating a rotting mushroom from a leaf and drinking ditchwater from an acorn cup.

She woke up with a jerk, her dream evaporating into the dawn – there was no sign of crystal goblet or silver plate, nor even of rotting mushroom and acorn cup – just the stillness of the forest. Charles was snoring, curled up tidily like a small hibernating animal. The fog had lifted, replaced by a watery dawnlight, nothing had changed, they were still alone in the heart of the wood.

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