Wait Till I Tell You (20 page)

When it moved, and he saw it too, he fell on his knees and called out to God. How I loved him then. He was forgiving our naughty little one, as a father should. The blanket began to fold and wrinkle as the small legs moved inside it. I saw that the blanket held everything we had.

Later in the next room that they found me for sitting in on my own with visits and gossiping trees outside all the windows, he brought me a blanket. I do not know if it is the same one that held the baby, but it is certainly similar. I fold it at night around the soaps and over my head and I lie in the portals of the bank. The soap hardly stirs or breathes but how it glows.

I am only a little disturbed by the tedious statements of the traffic lights as they mark the passing cars. The blanket and the soap never trouble me by talking. I see flowers carried sometimes by those who come to visit their money, but the flowers don't speak to me now that I have faded to a state where I am no longer their rival.

White Goods

I like to think we’re happy enough. Certainly we’re not too happy, so that must make us happy enough, I guess. It’s at the times when I stop and think to myself that I want for nothing that I feel that small gap. It’s like something I’ve forgotten, but which didn’t much matter anyhow, the words of a bedtime prayer or the shade of a lipstick worn by my mother. Small things which could lead on to bigger things if I’d the energy to think. I mentioned this feeling to Geoffrey.

‘Something in the tea,’ he said.

‘More likely something on the TV,’ I said. I’d heard some lively debates on the telly about television and what it does to your mind. The overstimulation, apparently, is what makes me feel switched off much of the time. My horizontal hold, too, has all but gone. I wouldn’t say that to Geoffrey, though, because he’d be sure to take it personally.

Reading, seemingly, that’s the great anecdote to telly. All fine for those with a free hand and free time on their hands. I mean you have to hold the book up and give it your full attention. I’ve got out of the way of the train of thought. It doesn’t stop here. We girls do miss that train, if you ask me. You’re forever going in six directions at once, doing the meals, cleaning the pots, finding Geoffrey’s glasses which he can’t find without his glasses, thinking about dead-heading while you’re brushing your hair, looking pleased to see people when they come by, even though what it means is foot-marks, disruption, and a wrangle with Geoffrey about the carpet which is, I freely admit, not a practical colour. Our recollections of who selected it differ, so consequently it’s a minefield. The thinking behind the carpet was that, since we live up here on the clay cap, we’d have a nice shade of russet. So that if we did have company and if that company had walked or had cause to get out of the car at all (Geoffrey has a logical mind), the mud or, if it had not been raining, dust, on their feet wouldn’t show up on any carpet we might purchase. But there was a shade which was on offer and it was a sort of ginger, called Rottweiler, I think, or something romantic, and the shop showed a photo display which did win me over. It was one of those full colour pictures of the past, showing the carpet in various locations, being crafted by craftsmen, walked on by sheep, and so on. The carpet being walked on by the sheep was green, naturally. Well, dyed. It’s OK though, I mean they were grazing the green carpet, but nevertheless it wasn’t cannibalism, was it, because the carpet was wool-type, not the pure new thing.

It’s easy to care for, granted, and I still get a thrill when I tell new acquaintances I call it teal or terracotta or curry or whatever it was. But it shows up clay and the crumbs of Bourbons like Albert Ross at the wedding in the poem.

Makes you want to bite the carpet sometimes, vacuuming in your head already while the visitors heedlessly walk on the carpet and gorge on biscuits prepared by your own fair hands. It was the past which sold me that carpet, I’ll admit it. I love the past, the way things were. Things were nicer in those times, more quaint, picturesque is the word I like to use. Things used to be traditional. There was time, for everybody. The rich man at his castle, the poor man at his cottage. There were values then, and standards. You knew where you stood. I don’t remember the past. It was before I was born.

Geoffrey has no time for the past, all the little touches which recall it. Take cooking, for example. For the modern wife it should be a leisure activity. I purchased myself a device which is said to be especially useful in the preparation of crowdie, bannock and other receipts of yesteryear, and with it came a kit for making batik. Batik is a craft as practised by our forebears, who wore robes richly devised with its motifs. I have made several useful gifts and an unusual kneeler for gardening.

Geoffrey, though, doesn’t care for my new device, or for the batik I have made with such care. He calls the one modern and the other fusty and he says life is for living. Well, that has to be the case, but I’ve never quite managed it, not recently at any rate. I mean, I know I’m alive because I hurt if I drop the hot wax from the batik kit on my hand, for instance. In fact it’s at times like that I do know I’m alive.

Let’s think of other times I’ve lived life to the full, like when I get a little bug of hot wax on my hand, and it makes a blister the same size and with the same softness just a bit later. But you can’t flick the blister off, so it’s extra lucky really, a little ladybird of skin to remind you you have lived. Other times? I feel quite alive when I’ve got every last thing done and I know there’s a clear half-hour before Geoffrey gets in. I’ve dusted and vacuumed our starter flat – Geoffrey says Hoovered is not a real word, would you say I’ve Haytered the garden? Well, I would, of course, because I have hated it all my married life, but I wouldn’t say because that would be off the point, even I can see that. What Geoffrey is minding is, he tells me, often as not unprompted, the misapprehension of proper nouns, or somesuch.

Geoffrey teaches. I made the bag he takes to school. He hides it in the car and really uses a different container for his documents, a leather briefcase with spinning lock-barrels and a combination. I like to think of him doing all that transferring of papers in the car. When this small pleasure goes a bit dim, I make him tuna sandwiches. Geoffrey dislikes odours and tuna lingers longer. I give him mayonnaise on the tuna because Geoffrey dislikes all forms of mayonnaise. Or he says he does, and has been saying so since we married. He says it’s messy and unnecessary and makes things all the same. He rants on when he hits this topic. The pasteurised culture, or something like that. Though I could do with more fields, myself. Sometimes, if the bag-swapping ritual has been omitted, the sandwiches settle and develop a culture of their own in my home-made bag. The bag isn’t batik, it’s Amerindian folk art sort of thing. I emblazoned a simple beadwork and chamois pouch with Geoffrey’s initials. For this purpose, I made a small branding iron with copper wiring, held in my mum’s old laundry-tongs to avoid getting my fingers burnt. I heated it up over the naked flame of my hob.

The flames are like blue flowers when they’re up high. Geoffrey says no flower is blue. The meconopsis poppy, found in the high Himalayas and in the environs of Inverness, is in fact blue, Geoffrey, I refrain from saying. I found this in a supplement on exotic honeymoon locations. We walked Hadrian’s Wall on our honeymoon. That’s Geoffrey all along. I wasn’t snippy like this till we were wed, and then I saw clear as day how it’s all effort and perfection and homebaking and fresh undies.

When else do I live life? Thinking about it, what the occasions have in common is a kind of brightness and heat. Sixpences, which were coins in the bit of past I was present during, though it did not feel like the past at the time, well, sixpences were thin coins the size and lightness of the circle of card at the top of the pack in those tubes of Horlicks tablets. Think how exciting your life must be I don’t think if you pop Horlicks tablets. Sixpences were not worth six pence, nothing being what it seems. But I loved sixpence, cunning little sixpence, because with it you could buy gas for the fire. The fire was made of a kind of honeycomb of chalk, bevelled off like little white knucklebones. You’d put in the sixpence and turn a smooth brass key which smelt of Brasso. There’d be a bang as you struck your match and applied it to the suddenly thick air, and a big pale purple and orange sheet would billow out, then suck itself in behind the chalky honeycomb. The little white bones would begin to glow red.

People like watching open fires, for the things they see in the flames, peacocks, chariots, lovers, the future. I watch gas fires. I like to sit in the dark and watch the way shadows exaggerate just a bit and things shiver before your eyes in the rising heat.

I love those drinks waiters light. They seem to promise a night of heat and dark. Italian, they are. You can have that one in the glass like a small schooner and the coffee bean goes berserk on the top. A glass of flames, blazing like a thistle. I like the smell of burning, come to think of it.

I like to know things. To this end I attend occasional classes at our local clinic. I like first aid. We pass around the doll and give it mouth to mouth and by the end there’s a taste of curry on its plastic lips. But fire drill’s my favourite. I have swift reactions and have never known the fear of flames. I like to know what not to do. Sodium, now, you must never attempt to quench its flames with water because water makes it burn. And they tell you to roll your children up, like kid kebabs, in a largeish piece of carpet you have handy. Not our carpet, though. It’d adhere, being synthetic.

I have felt alive on other occasions which I should enumerate. I would never wish to flout myself but I was on one occasion the queen of our local steam fair. This was before Geoffrey and I moved up here, when I was still at home with my mother and the other girls. I had some shoes that summer which I dyed all colours, starting with a pale yellow at the beginning of May and ending with midnight blue and silver at the close of September. There was a primer for the shoe dye you could breathe and get all sleepy and excited. It was also highly combustible, it said on the bottle, though you could tell from the whiff which skinned your throat much in the way of that Italian drink which I was saying. The coloured shoes took me through the summer. In the morning I’d do my little sisters’ hair. They had brown hair and it brushed like water, dead straight. The little one still had creases like a pup at the back of her head, and if I brushed for a long time, she’d nod off, with her head on her fat elbows, forgetting her breakfast jam sandwich. The middle one would pick off the strawbs from the jam like a thrush with snails. It was nice those mornings.

Then I’d dress myself, paying every attention to detail, and spend the day with my girlfriends till the little one finished school. Spend was the word. We spent time. It seemed there was always more.

My only regular obligation was church. I sang in the choir. One Passiontide the vicar told me that he was heartened in these heathen times to see my response to the Passion of Our Lord. Passion means suffering, Geoffrey will tell you that. Factory-farmed lamb is lamb that has known passion, don’t let them tell you anything else. My eyes were full of tears as I sang. I had a poorly eye at the time and had tipped in chemistry-set tears from a dropper to help it along. The funny bit was that the false tears brought out real ones.

I got made queen of the steam fair because I hung about by the steam engines. I like the smell of oiled machines and the glow of fire. I was pretty too but that wasn’t the main thing. I mean, anyone who spent that time on herself would be pretty. I was like a wax dolly, painted up. If you’d’ve lit my face, it would’ve melted. I had creosote lashes and lips red like that wax which comes on those big yellow grins of that cheese from Edam’s. If you’d’ve toasted me, I’d’ve been burnt quick as a witch.

The beauty of that night when I was the queen of the steam fair was all the kinds of fire. There were children running round with nightlights in pumpkins, a single melting tooth inside a big open grin. The smells were delicious, the toffee smell of baking pumpkin and the oily smell of engines. Three barrel organs played three different tunes. There was a smell of hot sugar and the smoke of used-up sparklers added to the main reek of hot iron. Did I mention about Geoffrey and odours? He can tell if I’ve eaten anything untoward in the day by my kiss, which I should say is not always one of the most intense friendliness, when he gets in. We’ve not yet decided about children, whether they’re worth the hazard to Geoffrey’s nasal membranes, I mean.

So, at the steam fair. The air was hissing with deep fat and burnt sugar. There were the scents of burnt stubble and gunpowder from the squibs the boys had been letting off. Steam engines don’t scare like horses. It was night-time, see, did I say, so the fireworks were fiery in the night’s blackness. They went up, the one, then the other, then countless, a house of rushing and light in an exploding roof over my head. The walls streamed stars. There was no room for the cold.

I’ve, no, we’ve, bought a new fridge. Geoffrey refers to it by the full name, refrigerator. He speaks the word in a careful way as though tipping someone the wink as to how to spell it. Either that, or as if Refrigerator was a super hero, some hunk dressed in icicles and an ice-tray come to save us from the evil forces of milk past sell-by and eggs which have slept in. We had a perfectly nice fridge before, knee-high and enamelled a sort of cream colour. We bought it off one of those postcards in a tobacconist’s window, ‘Everything must go, no item over £8.’ Geoffrey laughs at the wording and goes quiet on the way home from plundering these families who are selling their worldly goods for less than the price of a pair of shoes the lot. Most of them have a story. Quite often it is not true, for example that they have come into some money so are going to lash out on a new fridge, baby bouncer, stripped-pine orange box and set of slightly worn copies of
Woman and Home
. Often they have offered us tea and I signal with my face to Geoffrey that they are just being nice. ‘How very good of you,’ says Geoffrey, pleating his trousers at the knee, tossing the keys of our Fiat and our flat on to the table and looking about like a dog for biscuits. One family had a tea cosy with panels in it in case their teapot put on weight. There was a man who told us he was in a state of temporary embarrassment. The ceiling was lath. The plaster was all fallen, and remained wherever it had landed over the years. The whole bedsit was under a snow of plaster, sardine tins under snow, the tap with its ledge of snow, the Zed-bed with a tartan rug under snow. There was snow in the old man’s hair, and, as we drank tea, a snow of dust fell from the ceiling. It never stopped and you could not see where it was coming from. Perhaps it was sifting down from some upper room, passing through different people’s lives as it came. Always run your home, it says in my bridal book, as though the side could be taken off it like an enormous doll’s house, or in our case doll’s flat. God gets that view without removing the wall.