Death of a Perfect Mother (7 page)

Still, spring flowers there were, and the odd bush she
could make feints at, in pretence of pruning. Which is more than could be said for Guy Fawcett's garden, which was a weedy lawn, and beyond that a wilderness: tall straggly bits of weeds, grasses and flowers that had been planted and forgotten. Any less blatant person would have been embarrassed at the pretence of ever working in it or caring what happened to it.

‘Hot work this,' said Guy, unbending from doing nothing very much by a border and drawing a fleshy arm across his brow.

‘Got to be done,' said Lill, flashing a head-on smile while snapping away at a depressed and dusty rose-bush that looked more in need of pep-pills than pruning. ‘You don't get anything in this world you don't work for.'

‘True,' said Guy, though neither of them believed a word of it: neither of them had got where they were, or enjoyed the pleasures they did enjoy, as a result of the sweat of their brows. Guy weighed straight in, as was his custom. ‘God, you look a million dollars today, Lill. I don't know how you do it. Time doesn't just stand still with you. It walks backwards, like leaving the Queen's presence.'

This flowery compliment was typical of Guy in the early stages, but it was wasted on Lill, who knew nothing of the mysteries of locomotion before royalty. ‘Go on,' she said, which was a good all-purpose remark she made a lot of use of. ‘Few more years and I'll be past my prime!'

‘I shan't live to see that,' returned Guy. As though drawn by invisible plastic gardening twine they both approached the waist-high fence. Lill threw up her arms in a gesture of girlish ecstasy and exclaimed: ‘Oh, I love Spring!'

They looked at the scratchy earth, poked through by the dusty leaves of newly-sprouting bulbs and sighed sentimentally. ‘Yes, it makes you think, Spring,' said Guy. His thick, sensual, self-admiring lips slid into a meaningful
grin: ‘Eh, Lill? Doesn't Spring make you think of a lot of things you could be doing?'

‘Maybe,' said Lill. ‘And I don't suppose you mean digging the potato patch either.'

‘Not exactly,' agreed Guy, the grin still fixed but mobile on his lips, and his eyes resting on her powdery face. ‘But when you get to our age—say thirty-five—'

‘Say twenty-five if you like,' said Lill agreeably.

‘—you realize there's some things—things you want to do—and that time's not on your side any longer—that you'd be silly
not
to do them if that's what you fancy—because in a few years it'll be too late, if you follow me.'

‘Just about,' said Lill. ‘It's difficult, but I'm doing my best.'

‘Specially,' concluded Guy with a leer, ‘when they hurt nobody. Not, of course, that anybody'd know anyway.'

‘My Fred's a terror when he's roused,' said Lill. ‘You wouldn't think it to look at him, but by golly he is!'

Guy repressed a chortle of disbelief, and tensed his shoulders and arms to show off his biceps. I'd fight for you, Lill, he was saying as clearly as if he'd spoken. Lill was thrilled. She said: ‘Naturally whatever I did I'd always be careful, because of Fred . . .'

The half-concession was obvious, but Guy played his game for one more move. He put on an expression of great tenderness: ‘You're lucky to have someone who really cares. I don't think my wife would care at all, whatever I did. Ours is a funny marriage. My wife doesn't understand me at all.'

‘Blimey, she ought to,' cackled Lill, breaking the mood. ‘I understand you all right.'

‘Why are we wasting time, then, eh Lill?' And Guy Fawcett bent his heavy body urgently forward to hers over the fence. ‘Let's get on with it. Have a bit of fun before your lot comes back for their lunch.'

Lill retreated flirtatiously to the depressing rose-bush. ‘Well, I don't say that if you come round the back door in ten minutes with a book you'd promised to lend me I wouldn't let you in.'

‘Oh, come off it Lill. Since when have you taken up with literature? Nobody'd buy that even if they heard me. I'll just hop over the fence—'

‘Hey, give over you saucy bastard—' But by then Guy Fawcett had done a one-hand spring over the rickety fence and was approaching her with looks of cinematic lust in his eyes. ‘Hey, give over Guy, someone might see us. Me mother—'

And at that moment Lill, in giggling mock-flight, did turn her head round in the direction of her mother's garden, and saw through the gap in the straggling hedge her mother, square and aproned on a kitchen chair, peeling potatoes in the watery sun and regarding them with an air of malevolent disapproval, lips pursed, old black eyes flashing.

Lill's reaction was instantaneous and sincere: she turned back towards the gap in the hedge and whipped her fingers into a vicious V-sign. Then she put her arm around Guy Fawcett's substantial waist, let him paw over her shoulders and round to her triumphal breasts, and so the pair went off towards the kitchen door in an ecstasy of simulated amusement. The back door was shut with tremendous emphasis, and strain as her old ears might, Mrs Casey heard no more. Lill and Fred's bedroom was at the front of the house. Shaking her head, and with a tear of shame or rage at the corners of her eyes, she put a cloth over her bowl of potatoes and slowly, arthritically, made her way back to her own kitchen.

• • •

‘Penny for 'em, Fred. What are you thinking about?'

It was one of Fred's mates in the parks department who asked, coming up behind him as he filled in time before
the dinner-hour in the garden around the war memorial. It was a question they often felt impelled to ask him, as he poked aimlessly around with hoe or rake, doing no good to anyone and positive harm to the newly bedded plants that before many weeks were out would spell ‘Welcome to Todmarsh' in pink, yellow and blue under the names of the fallen. And when he was challenged, Fred usually replied: ‘Wondering what'll win the two-thirty at Newmarket,' or ‘Remembering that goal in the second half of the cup-tie last Saturday,' and then went back a little more purposefully to his work. A more honest reply would have been ‘Nothing.' For in fact Fred had a tremendous capacity for letting his mind go completely blank and stay that way for hours at a time. But even Fred realized that reply would lay him open to ridicule, so he always concocted something. Today he said: ‘Just thinking that if I'd got that double seven in the darts Saturday night we'd've won.'

‘Oh aye,' said his mate. ‘Thought you were down the Rose and Crown Saturday night with your family.'

‘Only early on,' said Fred, perking up a little, and excavating energetically around a petunia which would very much rather have been left alone. ‘Only early on. Couldn't let the team down.'

‘Celebration, wasn't it? Birthday or summat?'

‘My Gordon's twenty-sixth,' said Fred, his skinny frame swelling with pride.

‘Glad he's out the army and doing well for himself. Looks a fine lad. Twenty-six, eh? Wouldn't have thought it possible, looking at your Lill.'

‘No, you're right. She's a fine woman. O' course I married her young.'

‘You must have, at that. Bit of a handful for you, eh Fred? Beautiful woman like that?' His mate nudged him in the ribs. ‘Better keep her on a short leash, eh, or
there'll be others wanting to poke your grate.' And he snickered.

Fred remained for a minute in contemplation, and then he said with the shadow of a spark: ‘Hold on, Bill. I don't like you making suggestions like that.'

But by this time his mate had gone back to his work, and after looking blearily at his back for a minute or two, Fred went on with his picking and poking around the flower-beds that never came to anything very much. It would be difficult to tell whether he was deep in thought.

• • •

‘Oh lumme, what are you doing?' shouted Lill, dying with laughter. ‘Blimey, I never thought of that one!'

‘Learn a lot when you're with me, Lill,' said Guy Fawcett, continuing what he was doing.

• • •

Mrs Casey went around her house, meticulously dusting and wiping over her relics of Leicester in the 'thirties. Then she finished the preparations for her lunch. She had been so long alone that cooking for one presented no problems for her. Today she had a little bit of cod, which she was fond of and which had become quite a treat in recent years. But now her heart wasn't in her preparations. She read her paper, but it was one that had recently been shaved down into a tabloid, and it gave her no pleasure. There are no newspapers now for the Mrs Caseys of this world. She took up her library book, but she had lost the thread of the story and failed to pick it up again. In the end she gave in, and sat before the electric fire in her front room, just staring ahead of her.

Finally, she said to herself aloud—that aloudness giving it the seal of a conclusion or a decision: ‘It's a right shame. In his house too. Someone ought to tell Fred about it.'

She drew her thin lips even tighter around her old teeth, nodded her head and went out in better heart to fry her cod.

• • •

‘Oh, you are a devil,' said Lill at last. ‘I'd never have thought you had it in you. Quite an education, really. Just like one of those manuals you read about.'

‘Quite good, eh?' agreed Guy Fawcett, relaxing on his back with an expression of sublime conceit on his face. ‘Expect I could teach old Fred a thing or two.'

Lill sniggered disloyally. ‘Gawd, don't mention him. I'd better go down and boil his potatoes.' For some reason Guy sniggered in his turn. ‘Here,' said Lill, as she struggled out of bed. ‘We ought to do this more often.'

‘Come back when you've put the spuds on, and we'll see,' said Guy in a seigneurial way.

‘Didn't mean that, you clot,' said Lill. And when she returned and snuggled back against his fleshy frame in bed she said: ‘We could make this a regular thing.'

‘Tuesdays and Fridays?' said Guy. ‘Regular servicing with a stamped receipt? That's not my line, Lill, not my line at all. I'm not the sort to get fenced in.'

‘Why not?' protested Lill. ‘If you enjoyed yourself . . . ?'

‘Oh, I enjoyed it. But I like to play it by ear. Take it as it comes. I'm not a boy that can work regular hours.'

‘Well, you're damned lucky your wife does,' said Lill with spirit. ‘Wonder what she'd say if I told her.'

‘Don't push your luck, Lill,' said Guy Fawcett, pressing her shoulders brutally down against the pillows. ‘Or you'll be riding for a fall.'

• • •

‘Hey, Brian,' said one of his classmates as they came out of a period on Palmerston's foreign policy and headed towards the long huts where dinner was served. ‘Some of us are going over to Puddlesham to a disco on Saturday night. Are you coming?'

‘Saturday night?' said Brian, pushing back that troublesome lock of hair from over his eyes. ‘No, Saturday night I've got something on.'

The Coponawi Islands, which Mr Achituko had left for the drizzle and wheeze of an English winter, were dots on the map—courtesy dots at that—in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from civilization, and not much nearer to Queensland. The islanders had undoubtedly been cannibal until the early eighteen-seventies, when they were Christianized by a gaunt, determined missionary, inevitably a Scot, a graduate of Edinburgh and Exeter Hall, a man so feared and respected that at his death—four years after his arrival, and before his flock could readily distinguish between Elijah and Elisha—his body was subjected to no more than the odd reverent nibble.

His flock's understanding of their new faith was at that point still wavering and nebulous, but some few could read, and when they discovered among his books (most of them too long and heavy for intellectual comfort) a little volume entitled
The Wise and Witty Sayings of George Eliot
they modelled their religion around her precepts and (in direct defiance of the good man's commands, which they easily in their minds reversed) set up wooden idols of the Sage which visiting anthropologists from Scandinavia later mistook for some form of horse worship imported by boat people from prehistoric North Africa.

Things had progressed rapidly in the Coponawi Islands since the Second World War. Nuclear tests had taken place in the vicinity and had put them on the map. Hippy colonies from California and Sydney had waxed there in the 'sixties and waned there in the 'seventies. Tourism
had burgeoned, concrete blocks had risen among the coconut palms, and only the occasional disappearance of a well-fed mid-Westerner, and the subsequent discovery of sneakers or orange-feathered alpine hat had led people to wonder whether old habits didn't die hard. Mr Achituko's mind had been formed by Peace Corps volunteers, very nearly deformed at the University of Hawaii, and now he was studying cultic offshoots of the major religions at the University of South Wessex, where a group of atheists and defrocked priests ran a very high-powered Comparative Religion Department. His was now a well-honed, highly sophisticated mind, though when he had recently visited the George Eliot Museum at Nuneaton the curator had been astonished to see him at various points during the guided tour performing the fourteen Stations of the Cross.

Thinking it over in bed on Saturday night, after the encounter with Lill in the Rose and Crown, Mr Achituko had been highly amused that Lill should suspect him of having designs on little Mrs Watson up the road. For in fact he was sleeping, on and off, with little Debbie Hodsden down the road, and he wouldn't have minded betting that, had she known, Lill would have been livid, not with moral outrage, but with jealousy.

Of course, it was hardly a settled thing with Debbie and could not be yet, even if Achituko decided to stay in Britain beyond the end of the academic year. His landlady was a woman of comparatively liberal mind (he had been accepted by her as a lodger after a long succession of Todmarshians had suddenly and unaccountably decided not to let rooms to students that academic year), but she had made it clear that she drew the line at miscegenational sex. ‘It's not so much me,' she had explained, in fear of attracting to herself that most hated of modem labels, being called narrow-minded, ‘it's what the neighbours might say. You know what people are.'