Wait Till I Tell You (18 page)

Tea over, Nurse bathed me and read a story to me, a story too young for my age in order to foil nightmares. We also conspired to keep me a baby, so my parents needed her and she could hold my own helplessness against her dismissal, when it came.

My parents overcame their fraught lassitude for long enough to give me a good-night talk on the warping of furniture ferrules in comparative latitudes (my father) and the lost-wax art of a man (am I tidying the past unmercifully?) called Gloss O’Chrysostom (my mother). If he had listened, and she had momentarily emerged from her hypochondriacal trance, they might have found one another quite interesting. As it was, he worked at home, there was not yet a war to take and glorify him, and she simply had too little to do. I, as a child, was not sickened by all that rich leisure, since that is a child’s state, to judge its own circumstances the norm. And children have not learnt to measure time. Nevertheless, through observing my parents observe time and its passage (clocks, watches, timers, tolling, chiming, sounding, and the terrible mealtime gong), I was fast losing that innocence.

I said prayers to Nurse, having rescinded to my mother the elaborate pieties she knew I had enunciated to my father. My private prayers were simple, ‘God bless me and God bless Nurse and God bless the Morton cousins.’ Their Christian names were easier than mine, John, Bobby, Mary and Josephine. Noel Coverley was my name. I have two middle names which I will tell no one. They attest the intimate spitefulness of my father, who has ensured that I recollect his coldness and his pretensions every time I fill in an official form. Thus he has slung my adult self about with the unhappy overdainty child I was. My grandfather had been the brother of their grandmother. It was the sister of these two who had died in the cold flat by the river. Another thing I love about mathematics of the sort I live among is the way that they blunt the points of time’s callipers, by stretching them so far apart, into other sorts of time. Families do the opposite, all the relationships marking time so clearly on that short wooden ruler.

She lay in her coffin and the flowers held out in the steady cool for the whole service, which was long, and presided over by Anglican nuns. My parents and Nurse and I (in the coat) were driven in our grey Morris. The cemetery was beyond Chiswick. The cousins and their parents had come in a car they had hired for the day. Our driver sat in our car. Theirs went for a walk and bought a paper and a bag of pears. Nurse, who was a thorough Presbyterian and averse to what she called ‘smells and lace’, shared the pears with him. She was partial to a little fruit.

It was my first funeral. Several things about it were unbearable yet intensely pleasurable. The only completely awful thing was the thought of a person in a box. The words of the service went to my head, so my tears were delicious. The 23rd psalm seemed to paint a nursery Arcady where a nurse and not a parent was in charge. We would all be good and fear would be cast out. For the duration of the funeral, I ceased fretting. I did not once look at my mother’s defiant white cerements, her alarmingly druidical hat.

The mother of the cousins wore a woolly mulberry thing and she gave me a nice smile when the sermon was threatening to break the richly religious mood. Each of my cousins wore a navy blue felt hat. I had almost chewed through the elastic on my own hat. I could feel its petersham ribbons on the back of my neck. I was a skinny boy with blue knees and pale red nostrils. I had the strength of ten. I was always hungry, though I did not eat in front of my parents if I could help it.

We crossed the road that divided the church from the graveyard where my great-aunt was to be buried. I was prepared for this burying to be the most shocking thing I had seen, worse than my father battering on my mother’s door, worse even than seeing a dog shot. So I was better off than Mary and Josephine whose faces crumpled as they saw the spadeful of earth land on that box containing a person. Perhaps they had suddenly realised that they might not live for ever. There was a wind, and while there were fewer motor cars in those days, the dirt from the Great West Road was worse. Our eyes filled with grit and our noses with the smell of cinders. John and Bobby did like men; they screwed up their faces so that no tear could possibly find its way out. I, being ‘delicate’, was expected to cry, and did so with unmixed pleasure.

The only thing which shook me was the presence of another, unknown, child at the funeral. She was standing with two adult people. She made them look ridiculously large. She might have been my sister, she was so thin. She had a smirk behind her becoming tears. Her mother and father looked sleek and almost impolitely well-groomed. The small girl was dressed in a blue velvet cape with white fur like a frosty Eskimo doll. From the blue velvet bag she carried she extracted, still crying with her face, a peppermint disc the size of a florin. I smelt it amid the wool and naphtha. I looked reverent and stared hard at her from under my lowered lids.

It was not only the mint of which I was jealous. Would this child come back to the cousins’ house? Would she offer them more highly flavoured snippets than I let them have from our different way of life? Was she related to me? Or to them, and not to me? I sent up a prayer which mentioned my great-aunt only incidentally. Its main petition was that my cousins did not, or would not, excessively care for this child.

My mother took my hand in her gloved one. The kid felt like the lids of mushrooms. I knew what she was going to say and had a pretty good idea what she was going to do. Piously, for health reasons, against burial, she was about to break a glass capsule of eucalyptus beneath her nose, and blow it loudly. It was only since I had become seven that she had ceased doing the same for me in any exposed place. She then said, ‘While we have a moment of peace’ (what a moment, our family at prayer in a windswept graveyard) ‘my dove, just take heed of your mother when she reminds you simply to rise above the dirt and devastation at the house of your cousins, who are by no means as fortunate as you. Naturally, for reasons of politeness, we cannot fail to attend the proceedings, but I know I can trust you not to have any needs or to give in to any temptations you may encounter.’ She meant don’t go to the lavatory and don’t eat.

One of the two lessons of that day was that death makes me hungry. It is as though food, the staff of life, were a spell against falling into dust.

The burial done, my parents and I joined Nurse. She had the sweetly acid smell of pears on her. Her grouse-claw brooch had already that day achieved much in the way of irking my mother. We all got into the grey car. It slunk through the small streets near the Morton house. The driver could not park in their street; he would have blocked it. We had passed on the way a vehicle as long as a lifeboat and red as a fire engine. Its chauffeur was upholstered in cherry red, with cavalryman’s boots. A whip would have been unsurprising. My parents, who until now had exchanged no sentence, only my father’s accustomed latent speech and my mother’s dammed silence, looked at each other. That in itself was unusual. They spoke together, ‘Victor and Stella.’ My father continued, my mother no doubt wrung out by the effort of speech. ‘And the odious child, a vision in coneyfur. I wonder they did not drown it. Of what possible use is it to them?’ My father was in this way approaching one of his favourite topics, the childrearing customs of the Spartans. He did that turn especially for Nurse, who could not control her outrage, even when she knew she was being riled on purpose. My mother remained silent, thinking no doubt of the struggle awaiting her in the Mortons’ house.

Their father I called Uncle Galway. He taught history, cricket and Latin at a nearby school. Aunt Fan taught part time at the school, when she was not busy with her children. Her subjects were botany and maths. She occasionally taught dressmaking, though even the pancloths she knitted were out of shape.

Their house was attached to its neighbour. It gave the impression of being a big cupboard, perhaps because nothing inside it was put away. In the sitting room, the temperament and pastimes of the Mortons were apparent. The room was stuffed with books, rags, wools, jigsaws, a tricycle, a tank of tarnishing but sprightly goldfish, a cat on a heap of mending, jars of poster paint, a shrimping net and some wooden laundry tongs lying on top of a crystal garden in its square battery-jar of waterglass.

Upstairs, I knew, there would be clothes everywhere, in optimistic ironing baskets, over bedheads, stuffed into ottomans. Everywhere were clothbound books, yellow, maroon, tired blue. In the bedrooms there was a good chance of hearing mice; the Mortons were allowed food wherever and whenever they wanted it. They kept apples and sweets in their chests of drawers, where socks might have been in another house. They were a family which shared its secrets.

The sitting room went straight into the kitchen. Today both rooms were occupied by those who had come on after the funeral. Why were my family, with so much larger a house, not entertaining the party? Their sallow social tone might have been suitable to the decorous gloom conventionally required by a funeral. But they had not offered. It seemed better, at the end of a long life, that there should be not my parents’ mean, ordered luxury, but what I saw spread out almost indecently in the kitchen, soft cheeses, deep pies, steaming fruit tarts, jugs of custard and of cream. Aunt Fan was dispensing the food with a battery of unsuitable implements, pie with an eggslice, trifle with a silver masonry tool, cheese with a palette knife, cream from an Argyll. It was a bright mess of colour and juice, squashiness and superfluity. Nurse and my mother stiffened, the one as she saw good food in quantity, the other as she perceived the prowling spectre of uncontrol with its attendant bacteria, spillage and decay.

My cousins fell on me, wagging like pups. Each of them held a thick slice of well-buttered black cake, so by the time they had greeted me I was an object of horror to my mother. She took a long look at me, winced, drew herself up, ruffled and settled her shoulders, and bent, in movement like a river-bird, to unbutton and remove my now Mortonfied coat.

Nurse fetched a plate for herself. My unspoken arrangement with the cousins was, as usual, to get myself upstairs unobserved. I think now that their parents colluded in this against my mother. The house’s muddle was a considerable help. I now, too, surmise that my mother’s desire to be free of me was even stronger than her dedication to germ warfare. And on this occasion it was clear that she could hardly remove her glare from the pair of grown-ups who must be Victor and Stella. They were tall and, separated from their curiously superior child, clothed in blatancy and confidence. My itch for vulgarity responded to those glittering froggings and facings.

But what concerned me was their daughter, now free of her velvet cape and revealed in a white cotton dress smocked in unfunereal red. The collar was embroidered with very small red strawberries, natty
fraises du bois
. The buttonholes down her back were sutured in the same bright red. Her hair was long, thin and white. She had no front teeth, just two gum spaces. This gave her a lisp. Bobby introduced us. She was Coverley too, her grandfather my grandfather’s brother. How had my father overlooked, in his passion for overinformation, especially where it touched upon himself, a whole knot of family? My cousins obviously liked this girl. So I hated her.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Is that woman your nurse?’ I saw Nurse, for an instant, without love. She was piling a large plate high with food, all mixed up. Her skirt was wide as a fender.

‘Yes, she is. And where’s yours?’

‘Left, they always have; can’t bear it.’ So she was one of those bad children who rushed through nurses and showed off about it.

‘What do you do to them?’ I asked, not in admiration as she might have hoped, but prissily.

‘It’s not me, it’s my father, and I can’t possibly say. I don’t know exactly but shall soon enough, my mother says. The last one broke his ivory hair brushes and tore up some of his clothes. My mama says it is something I shall learn all too soon. Men have a rolling eye, she says.’ All this with the toothless lisp. In spite of her chilling self-command, something gave me a hint of fellow feeling.

‘Is your mother mad?’ I asked. From observing Aunt Fan, I knew that my own mother was not typical.

‘Is yours?’ asked the child. ‘She looks it.’

‘Come on, you two.’ It was Mary. She stood between me and the other cousin, whose name was apparently Lucy, taking her left hand and my right. Mary was shorter and sturdier than we were. Nurse came over and blocked our way to the stairs. She did not mean to; she was just that fat. I looked up and saw she had two plates, spilling with good things, leaking over the edge. I read the names of the china in her shiny hands, ‘Spod’ and ‘Crown Derb’. Her fingers covered any remaining letters. Each of the plates had been broken, at least once. Now they were riveted, and should not have been used for food. Where the cracks were, a deep purple was beginning to appear, the juice of black fruits.

Nurse was a small eater, but she heaped her plate at the Mortons’ house.

‘Just go and fetch a cup of black tea, dear,’ she told me. She was not smiling.

‘And would you,’ she spoke to Lucy, ‘get a slice of lightly buttered bread?’

Equipped with this thin meal, we returned to Nurse. She wore her bowler-style hat indoors. She peered out from under it. The coast was clear.

She filled the narrow stairway as she led us up its druggeted steepness to the bedroom where our cousins had made a table of Josephine’s bed.

‘Pass me the tea, dear,’ she said. ‘And before either of you’ – she spoke to me and to Lucy – ‘starts on your meal, it’s bread and butter. Sit down.’