Wise Children (10 page)

‘Daffy dill, daffy dilly,’ she said. And once more broke into song, but one with words, this time.

I thought: That’s it! They’ll fade her now, for sure! But still and still and still they didn’t, not even when, now she’d got rid of her flowers, she cried out suddenly:

‘Off with it! You only lent it to me! Nothing was mine, not ever!’

And stripped off her Number 69 shirt, threw it to the floor and trampled on it. It was a shock to see her breasts under the cruel lights – long, heavy breasts, with big dark nipples, real breasts, not like the ones she’d shown off like borrowed finery to the glamour lenses. This was flesh, you could see that it would bleed, you could see how it fed babies.

Then Melchior did something wonderful. Who’d have thought the old man had it in him? Suddenly, Melchior is in shot, holding out a blond mink stole which he must have plucked off the very shoulders of his wife. He put his hand on her bare shoulder and said, ‘Pretty, pretty lady.’

Perhaps it was his tone of voice attracted her attention, that of a man selling old-fashioned rich black treacle toffee. When she turned towards him, he draped the stole round her shoulders, he covered her up.

Then My Lady Margarine stepped in, too. They’d been keeping her on the sidelines, the while, so that she could come in at the end and take charge of the cheque lest her better half did something senile with it. She’s in good nick, I must say; lots of exercise does it, and the odd nip and tuck helps. Her cheeks give the game away; they’ve got that tight, full, shiny chipmunk look that spells out: facelift. You can always tell. Nevertheless, good nick. She was a brunette at her wedding, but had gone blonde with age, evidently, and now sported a pale gold chignon. She’s crying, too, possibly for the loss of her mink stole but, be fair, more likely as a tribute to the moment. If My Lady Margarine gave up the stage for the sake of her family thirty-five years ago, she must have always regretted it in a tiny corner of her heart for when Fate offered her another chance out of the blue she grabbed it with both hands.

‘Oh, my dear,’ she said to Tiffany. ‘We wanted him to marry you so much. I begged him, I implored him.’

That brought Tristram out of his daze with a start, as if this was the first
he’d
heard of it. But Tiffany didn’t register, didn’t seem to hear. She was still shivering, in spite of the mink, but when she stroked her cheek against the fur, that made her smile, so lovely, so touching, she smiled that good child’s birthday smile and it was as if the touch of the fur gave her some of the strength of the animal, she came back together, again. She seemed to grow stronger before our very eyes; she didn’t come back to herself, exactly, but to somebody else who was in perfect control. She called out to an unseen presence off the set in a big, ringing voice: ‘Hey! Somebody call me a cab, right? A cab! Right away!’

Then she turned towards the camera, as she did every week. The cameraman who was in love with her zoomed in as she tossed one end of the mink stole over her shoulder in a devil-may-care way, as if anything could happen, now, and she gave the viewers the full force of her big smile, the professional one that offered a view of her hundred-octane teeth as far back as the emerging wisdoms. She raised her hand. She waved.

‘Goodnight, everybody!’ Signing off, as she always did: ‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite! Goodnight!’

Then, in mid-wave, this new, strong, defiant person with Tiffany’s face covered her mouth with her hand as if she were going to be sick, her face crumpled, she bolted off the set in the mink stole and the silk knickers and there they were, the Hazards, all three, left gaping like loons.

Tristram came to himself first, although his hands were still full of flowers. But he remembered the camera was watching him and even managed to scrape up a smile.

‘And goodnight, too, from me, Tristram Hazard, and my very special hundredth birthday guest, Sir Melchior Hazard –’

The good old goodbye formula. It reassured the studio audience. One or two of them started to clap, as if by doing that they could change what they had seen into what they ought to have seen.

‘– and his Lady –’

More applause.

‘– my very own extra special Dad and Mum –’

Applause doubled, trebled.

‘– and come and watch the lucky people win Lotsa Lolly! again, next week!’

Roars. Applause. Up came the credits over the three of them bravely waving farewells to the invisible punters. Nora rose up with some ceremony and killed the tape. The set crackled. Then there was silence.

‘I thought Tiff might be here,’ said Tristram after a bit, snuffling and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘We’ve looked everywhere else.’

‘Why didn’t you come here first of all, then?’

‘God, such a terrible night. . . The police. The casualty wards. We searched the night shelters.’

‘Who are this “we”?’ enquired Nora sharply.

‘Finally, well, I just passed out,’ said Tristram. ‘I couldn’t cope any more. She took me back to her place.’

‘Who,’ I asked, more sharply still, ‘is this “she”?’

As if we didn’t know. He was too scared to say out loud or else he wanted to keep it from Wheelchair. Then, again, he’d never shown any consideration for her sensibilities in the past; why did he want to start now? But Nora leaned forward and, with her long, lean fingertips, delicately plucked from his lapel one single hair, as red as his own hair but very, very much longer. She held it high, she let it dangle, proof positive that last night of all nights he’d spent with –

And that is the single, most unmentionable secret in this entire family’s bulging closetful of skeletons, that ever since he was little, Tristram and Saskia, although she is his half-sister and old enough to be his mother, in fact, his mother’s best friend, once upon a time . . . I thought our Tiff had weaned him off the nipple, but here was the evidence to prove the contrary.

‘Like a dog,’ said Nora, sneering at the hair, ‘returning to its own vomit.’

‘Oh, God!’ said Tristram. ‘Try to be a little understanding. Tiffany had vanished clean away, I was half mad with fear –’

The area door slammed, such a bang the back windows shuddered. Came heavy footsteps down the passage. We harkened. Brenda always let herself in.

‘I suppose,’ said Nora with heavy irony, for she knew swift retribution was at hand, ‘it never occurred to you to ask at her mother’s, did it?’

The kitchen door burst open. You could tell by the look on her face that she had seen his Porsche outside. She’d been a real slip of a thing, when she was a girl, but she’d put on a lot of weight after the kids, now she could give Leroy a pound or two, and strong as a horse, with it. She still had her rollers in, her carpet slippers on, but she was past grief, white with rage.

At least Tristram was spared the task of telling Brenda, the police had done that already. Leroy tried Tristram in his absence and found grounds for a verdict of justifiable homicide. When Bren told him that: ‘If her Dad gets his hands on you . . .’ she aimed a big whack at him and I thought I’d slip outside and put the kettle on, leave them to get on with it.

All of a sudden, I felt my age. If the youngest goes before you . . .

There’s a photo of Evelyn Laye on the wall above the tea caddy. ‘To twenty twinkling toes, with loads of love.’ I thought of Tiffany, ‘this little piggy goes to market’. And her feet, leaving blood behind them as she came down the staircase. She’d have made a cracking dancer, if she’d put her mind to it.

Then my heart felt as if a hand had squeezed it because I’d thought of our darling Tiffany in the past tense, hadn’t I?

Little Tiff.

Nora came out into the scullery and slipped her arm through mine. We watched the kettle bounce and hiss on the gas and listened to the sounds of fracas coming from the breakfast room. Smash! There goes a plate. The cats trampled themselves underfoot as they streaked out of the cat door. ‘Not good enough, was she!’ Muffled cry of pain from Tristram. ‘Treat her like dirt, did you! Well, see where it gets you!’ Then the telephone rang. I looked at Nora. She shut her eyes. We knew that ring meant bad news.

We took the tea in. Wheelchair was dealing with the telephone because the others hadn’t noticed it, in the heat of battle – Tristram, black eye, bloody nose, ripped jacket, torn shirt and it looked as if she’d tried to throttle him with his necktie but that was the worst of the damage, he was still conscious. The breakfast things had been trashed in the course of the tussle, bacon fat everywhere, but Brenda was spent, her hands hung limp, she was whimpering. ‘In her knickers, on the telly, in front of all those people, singing dirty songs. Her dad was watching everything. I can’t ever forgive you. Never.’ Wheelchair put the telephone down. One look at her face told us the worst.

‘That was the police, dear,’ she said to Brenda. You’ve got to hand it to the old girl, she’s got the manner pat, cool but not cold, sympathetic without slobbering. ‘Do sit down. I’m afraid it’s bad news.’

Brenda did not sit down, as if she thought that if she did, she’d never summon the heart to get up again; she hung onto the chair like grim death, making little noises in the back of her throat.

‘They found the body of a young girl in the river, this morning.’

There was a whoosh of rubber tyres as Wheelchair made a compassionate swoop upon Brenda, put her arms around as much of her lower torso as she could grapple. Ever the lady social worker.

‘Poor darling, prepare yourself. It’s something very terrible.’

In the war, in the mornings after air raids, you saw people look like Brenda looked, just then.

‘She hasn’t got a face left, Brenda. Evidently a police launch, the propellers –’

I remember that thin, high scream from the war, too.

Then she pulled herself together and had a cup of hot, sweet tea, which you give them for shock although she didn’t seem to notice drinking it and she and Tristram went off to the morgue in his Porsche. No point in rowing with him, now, was there? All he could say was: ‘I’m most frightfully sorry.’ He kept saying it over and over again. I’d have clocked him one for that, alone, if I’d been Brenda, but I don’t think the poor girl could so much as see him, now, couldn’t hear him, could think of nothing but our Tiff in the cold store drowned dead with the baby inside her drowned dead, too.

Wheelchair made her excuses and wheeled off into the basement front and after a while her gramophone started up, she’s got her own in there, there’d be bloodshed if we had to share. She’d put on a bit of funeral music, classical stuff, lugubrious, a big, brown, lugubrious voice: ‘What is life for me without thee?’

She’s overdoing it, a bit. I thought. She didn’t know Tiff
that
well. And I wish she could have picked a less affecting song.

Nora lifted off the lid of the teapot and poured in a tot of rum.

‘That’ll set us up.’

‘D’you think we ought to ring up Saskia and tell her where her boyfriend’s gone?’

‘We haven’t spoken to Saskia for forty years, don’t see why we should start now. Let her stew in her own juice. It’s all her bloody fault, anyway. If she hadn’t got her claws into Tristram . . .’

The singer on Wheelchair’s gramophone reprised the query, what would be left; then she sang: ‘Eurydice . . .’ The saddest sound. ‘Eurydice!’

Nora made a dismissing gesture and fell silent. We left the clearing away till after dinner, we put our feet up. Grey skies. Still that big wind, banging away outside. To think, this morning, I thought that wind would blow us an adventure, it wouldn’t matter what. Now look what it had blown us! Rain came in gusts over the garden, buffeting the forsythia. Forsythia, the exact colour of peroxide blond. Whenever I see forsythia, I think of Grandma.

‘He’s left his cassette behind,’ said Nora. ‘Worth a bit, I should think.’

But she didn’t sound too keen. Our blackmailing days are long gone.

‘Do you think they’ll cancel the party?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Nora. ‘I mean, she wasn’t really family, was she? Only in the family way.’

We put more rum in the tea. After all, it
was
our birthday.

‘What about us? Are we still going to the party?’

‘Life must go on,’ said Nora, all of a sudden full of life. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for a hundred million pounds.’

Two

NE, TWO, THREE
, hop! See me dance the polka. Once upon a time, there was an old woman in splitting black satin pounding away at an upright piano in a room over a haberdasher’s shop in Clapham High Street and her daughter in a pink tutu and wrinkled tights slapped at your ankles with a cane if you didn’t pick up your feet high enough. Once a week, every Saturday morning, Grandma Chance would wash us, brush us and do up our hair in sausage curls. We had long, brown stockings strung up to our liberty bodices by suspenders. Grandma Chance would take firm hold of one hand of each of us, then – ho! for the dancing class; off we’d trot to catch the tram.