Patrick Parker's Progress (3 page)

When Dolly came to stay, or when Florence visited London, the children were given their baths together. Florence did not like it and objected. 'There's a war on,' said Dolly firmly. 'Economy is important.' So here it was, in that warm, soap-scented water, that Florence told Patrick - and Little Audrey - all over again about the night of his birth and how he had escaped, that he was a miracle baby, that out of destruction he had been born. 'How clever you are,' said his mother, over and over again, as she watched his dexterous play with sponge and nailbrush and flannel. 'Clever, clever, clever boy.' When he had done with the play he drew steeples and roofs and chimney stacks in the steam on the mirror. It was all she could do to persuade him that he could not take his beloved wooden bricks into the bath.

Little Audrey watched. She was fascinated and repelled at this sweet talk. But she saw how it pleased Patrick. She also came to recognise the moment just before Patrick decided that he had had enough and required lifting out of the water - because before saying so he ran his little hands through his fluffy baby hair from forehead to back
...
As soon as she saw it she pulled out the plug and the splendid rushing gurgle always coincided with Patrick holding up his arms and saying, 'Out, Mummy, out.' Both Florence and Patrick would look at Audrey in astonishment. How did she always know? Or did she? Or was it always a coincidence? It was never - quite -distinguished. Florence Parker refused to consider the possibility that Little Audrey was bright.

On one occasion George suggested that he might bath baby Patrick for a change and Florence had looked so shocked - so defensive - it was as if he had suggested that he would quite like to brain his son with an axe. "That's for a mother to do,' said the mother in question. 'You'd probably drown him.' Audrey lifted her hands to George and offered herself, but of course there was no question of that.

Fortunately it was not considered odd if a father had nothing to do with his children until they misbehaved and needed attention. But George felt it. He could very likely count on the fingers of one hand, as he told Lilly, the number of times he had held his child. One of those was in church during the baptism. Florence watched him so sharply that he felt sure he would drop the little body. He liked holding Patrick, he liked the way the baby looked up into his eyes and struggled to make sense of what he saw - he liked the way, now that he was older, the boy tottered towards him and held up his arms. But

he let Florence have her way. 'Well
’
said Lilly, 'that's the way of it. Mother knows best.' Lilly had made a vow that she would never say anything bad to George about his wife. Sometimes she felt she could choke on the undertaking.

Lilly did not like to dwell on George's domestic arrangements because it always made him so mournful. And her. When he was mournful it reminded her that she had nothing much to look forward to, either. Neither of them spoke of the past. Too long ago and best forgotten were those days when they were both young and free and went for walks together by the canals because they had no money to do anything else. They held hands and spent their dreams instead. George would build himself a castle to live in and Lilly would make a garden. And then he married Florence and she married Alfred. Now he lived in three rooms and her bedroom looked out over a small back yard, a shed full of sweet boxes, and a patch of earth that never got the sun. All Lilly wanted, needed, now was a bit of fun and bugger the garden. 'I'm sure Flo knows what she's doing
’
she said sourly. 'She's devoted.'

He longed to talk to her, really talk to her, but if she said it was all just a bit of fun between them, then that is all it could be. He would rather have it than not. A little bit of Lilly at any price was worth it. 'She is
’
he said positively in return. 'Devoted. As you say'

When George suggested that he and Patrick pack up a picnic one day and go for a bit of a hike, something that George had once done with his own father and enjoyed, Florence said it was out of the question because of the biting cold. When George waited until the sun shone and suggested it again, Florence said that Patrick could not walk far in any case because he had weak ankles. It was the first anyone had heard of it but Patrick rather liked the idea. It meant that whenever he did not want to do anything, he had merely to flick his little foot over on its side and a big, purple bruise would arrive. 'I'll carry him on my shoulders
’
said George, as defiantly as he dared.

Patrick perked up at this but Florence said, 'You'll do no such thing. He might fall and crack his head open.'

An image of Humpty-Dumpty came to mind, and Patrick wailed. George decided to bide his time and wait until the boy was a bit older and a bit stronger. Meanwhile he left his son's welfare entirely in the arms of his wife and went on making his models of great buildings of the world. The war was coming to an end, the capitals of Europe would be free again, but he would never get to them now. He pinned up photographs as compensation and went on clipping tickets instead.

Bathtime continued as mother and son's special time. Even during the war years, when soap was hard to come by, and oils and lotions almost non-existent, most of the time Florence managed to get something to use on the fine, soft skin of her boy at bathtime. She even crushed rosemary leaves or lavender in season to make cod-liver oil smell agreeable, and she would rub it over her son's cheeks and
lips
, his legs and back and arms to keep him soft and protected. The chill winds of Midlands weather could blast his baby skin into flaky redness. When she took him out in the pram, or later toddling in the park, he was startlingly beautiful compared with the other children who had wet, sore, reddened noses and chilblained cheeks and hands. Towards the end of the war it had to be either the boilings from fish or Vaseline that Florence used. Something which the boy, even though he was under five, noticed and objected to. He was used to the best. He would have it. He ran his hands thro
ugh his hair in a gesture that Fl
orence now knew to prelude a tantrum. 'Don't want horrible smelly stuff -' he screamed. 'Want nice stuff.' Florence managed to find some glycerine on the black market. 'Better,' said Patrick, mollified. Later he marched up to his father and handed him the horrible fishy concoction that Florence had tried to use. 'For you, Father,' he said. And George, who knew nothing of the incident, was touched. At first. But from that moment Patrick developed a curious way of dealing with anything that he did not like, including spinach, which was to insist that his mother gave it to George, which she did. Florence said this was the boy's caring response to hard rations and not wanting to waste things, but George saw it as something quite different. More like contempt.

In his shed at the bottom of the garden George indulged himself. He moved on from wood and glue to buying bits and pieces of old Meccano and - his first project in the new medium - he replicated the station signal box. Patrick sidled down there, though his mother forbade it - V2 raids, the cold, the dark, his health, the mess - as he liked to watch unseen through the little window while his father made structures that looked infinitely complex and beautiful. If ever Florence caught him lingering there she brought him straight back indoors. She was torn between forbidding George his shed activities and enjoying the house and Patrick without the nuisance of his father. The former won. Just. And Patrick went on looking. George, absorbed in his task, never saw how rapt his son was by the intricacies of his handiwork.

2

Patrick at School

The first examples of masonry arch bridges date from as early as
1000
bc
and were first built in Persia where mud-plastered, bent reeds produced small vaulted huts. The free profile of bent stems tied across the top approximates to the ideal parabolic profile for a free-standing arch
...
Matthew Wells,
30
Bridges

A
month or two after D-Day the Parker family was finally and permanently rehoused in a three-up two-down on the edge of the town where the air was said to be purer. This would eventually mean the end of Lilly and the Wednesday afternoons. Not only because the journey across town was long, but because Florence decided it was time for the liaison to cease. She made it clear - though not in so many words - that now George was a father and his son was so knowing,
It
(unspecified) was no longer seemly. 'Halfway across Coventry,' she would say to the boy - just as if he was an adult - 'And for what, I ask you? For what?' And she would cross her arms and appear to juggle her swelling bosom. Her chest was formidable and she used it to advantage. It was as if, on finding itself no longer required,
Florence
's embonpoint was determined to maintain a high profile and palpable dudgeon.

Patrick was intrigued. Both by the juggled bosom and by the question. Neither was forthcoming. If he reached out to touch her bosom Florence always tapped his hand away calling him a naughty boy, but smiling all the same so that it was like a little game between them. If Patrick then asked, in his piping little voice, 'What does my father go halfway across Coventry for?' his mother
's
smile would fade. 'Never you mind.' And she would busy herself with something. 'It's not the sort of thing you'll want to know about.
..'
And out would come a biscuit, or his drawing things, or a scarf to tuck around him before they set off for a walk. He always liked his drawing things best. His mother would smile a particular smile, pat his arm, prop him up at the table on a cushion and tiptoe out of the room leaving him alone with his ideas and his thoughts. He was special, what he drew and imagined was special, and his mother kept his drawings, every one. When Little Audrey came to stay she did almost nothing you could possibly recognise on her paper. Patrick was contemptuous. He was also the tiniest, weeniest bit envious of the way she held her pencil in her fist and just seemed to throw the colours at the page. When he pointed out it was a mess she merely beamed at him and made some more. At the end of the session there would be polite maternal praise for her work and then it would be screwed up and thrown away. Little Audrey did not seem to mind. Later, though, when she drew pictures of Queens and Princesses, she liked to keep them, even though Patrick always liked to explain how the arms were too long or she had only put three fingers on a hand.

Patrick noticed that Little Audrey's mother was very different with her daughter from the way Patrick's mother was with him. Dolly quite often told her little girl not to bother her, to go and play in the yard and to find something to do. Patrick's mother never said any of those things. If he was ever at a loss, she was always there to talk or amuse or suggest. And she still liked to sit him on her lap, which Little Audrey's mother very seldom accommodated, calling her daughter - though she smiled as she said it - a big fat lump and too big to be carried. Unless she was that universally invoked word 'tired' - she had a scream on her if she wanted to - she toddled off quite unconcerned. Dolly also said quite often, 'You're a big girl now and I'm busy.' Patrick - when he was called a big boy - knew it was always an invitation to stay and be praised. There were, it seemed, different ways to be and different degrees of importance. Some children were not as important as he was and this fitted in with his experience quite perfectly.

The other difference he noticed was the difference in attitude between his mother and himself, and his mother and his father. They never touched, hardly spoke unless it was a question: Do you want tea, fish for supper, an egg? Is the rubbish out? Have you seen the paper? And sometimes Florence would listen to her husband and then, behind his back, turn to Patrick and roll her eyes and grimace. It seemed to him it was the way things were when you got older.
‘I
will never grow up,' he said to Florence, putting his arms around her neck one night after a particularly exhilarating, if confusing, eye rolling. She hugged him back as if that were the right answer to some silent question.

If he was lucky, if the crossness that Florence felt on account of this
'It'
thing that his father went across town for made her truly irate, he might wheedle the odd hint or image of what it was. He imagined a place made of cotton wool in which a creature called Lilly-Her-That-One, gave presents to his father and offered him pleasure with no thought for anyone else
...
To Patrick this was really intriguing. Like Santa's Grotto at Webb's.

'Perhaps if you gave my dad some presents with no thought for anyone else he wouldn't go halfway across town to Lilly-Her-That-One for them?' he said.

Florence looked at him with a new expression on her face, which was a mixture of anger and fear, and it was then she decided that enough was enough.

When his father came home on that Wednesday evening, Patrick was waiting for him.

'Where is your present?' he asked.

George stared at him.

'From Lilly-Her-That-One?'

'You see,' hissed Florence. 'You see?'

George never went for a Wednesday afternoon again. He told Lilly, by letter, that it was for the boy's sake, and for the respectability of his wife and the community. Lilly tore it up into tiny little pieces and did not reply. She knew that it was not what he wanted, that the sanctimonious tone was not his but his wife's. What she did not know was that what he really wanted to write but which was buried somewhere beneath the priggish, stilted phrases, was 'Come away with me
...'
But you could not say that to someone who only wanted a bit of fun. And whose husband was impaired.