Human Croquet (26 page)

‘Where’s Debbie?’

Vinny snorts with malign laughter. ‘Standing guard over the corner-cabinet probably.’

Vinny’s right, Debbie is monitoring the contents of the china-cabinet in the dining-room. ‘The second I turn my back,’ she says resentfully, indicating a pair of Worcester plates and a Dresden shepherdess, ‘they all move around.’

‘Really?’

‘But they’re not stupid – the minute anyone else comes in the room they don’t budge an inch.’

This surely isn’t part of Capgras’s Syndrome? ‘You don’t think they’re close relatives or anything, do you?’

She gives me a look of profound disdain. ‘I’m not a complete idiot, Isobel.’ But can she tell a hawk from a handsaw? That’s the question.

She stalks off, forgetful of the wailing baby, and takes a duster and polish from somewhere about her person (soon it will be white rabbits) and starts rubbing the doorknobs. Again and again. And then some more.

‘Are you OK, Audrey?’

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘There’s nothing you want to … well, tell me?’

‘No,’ she answers and turns her face away. (‘That lovely shawl you knitted,’ I say conversationally to Mrs Baxter, ‘you know, the one for your niece in South Africa? Did she – er – like it?’

‘Oh, I don’t think she’s got it yet,’ Mrs Baxter says. ‘I sent it surface mail because the baby isn’t due until next month. It takes for ever,’ she adds, although it’s unclear whether she means the mail to South Africa or the gestation of a child.)

Certain things dawn on me slowly. For one – the strange ‘Autumn Leaves’ patterned stair-carpet has been replaced with an older and old-fashioned one – red, figured with blue and green (much nicer) – and the stairs have suddenly sprouted brass stair-rods – ‘sprouted’ may not be the correct verb for the sudden appearance of stair-rods, but what is? Apart from ‘rain’, of course? I pause on the landing to try and work this one out. The new flock wallpaper has also disappeared and been replaced with a heavy anaglypta, painted magnolia above the dado – long gone under Debbie’s regime – and dark green below.

I must be in the past. Just like that. But is it my own past? I cast around for clues, will I see my younger self coming out of a room? (Perhaps that’s how we get doubles? Bring them back from the past?) A noise makes me look back down the stairs. A young woman (not me) has just entered the hallway and is now coming up the stairs. Judging by the way she looks – low-waisted dress with a handkerchief-point hem above her thin ankles – I must have pitched up around 1920.

She walks past me, quite oblivious to my presence (thank goodness she doesn’t walk
through
me, that would be unnerving) and races up the stairs to the attic. Curious, I follow her into my own room – which is my room and yet not my room – where she sits at a heavy Victorian dressing-table and peers at her reflection in the mirror. She seems to be getting ready for a party, judging by the dress – a hand-made turquoise silk, scattered with big rosettes in the same material, astonishing in its ugliness – and the number of rejected outfits strewn around the untidy room.

She’s rather plain to look at, but there’s something attractive and open about her expression – the kind of youthful optimism that seems to have passed by me and Charles – and Audrey too, come to think of it. She sits looking at herself for quite a long time and then suddenly loosens the chignon of hair at the nape of her neck and picks up a big pair of dressmaking shears that are sitting on the dressing-table and with one awkward cut, relieves herself of her hair.

The result is a disaster but she tidies it up with the shears into a rough approximation of a flapper bob and ties on a squaw-type headband of sequins and looks at the result with some pleasure. An indistinct voice floats up the stairs with the message that Mr Fitzgerald is here for her and growing impatient.

When she leaves the room, I’m close on her heels. Down on the landing she almost trips over a little boy – seven or eight years old, cute in his little sailor suit – who gasps at the sight of the shorn locks. She ignores him. We reach the downstairs hallway, the girl is ahead of me, walking into the living-room, met by a scream from someone invisible. ‘Your hair! What have you done to your hair, Lavinia?’ and an uncertain male voice (Mr Fitzgerald, I suppose) saying, ‘Good God, Vinny, what on earth have you done to yourself?’

Vinny! I would never have recognized our aunt in this young girl. It just goes to show. The Arden of Vinny’s youth is much nicer than the one we inhabit today, it smells of lavender and roast beef and gleams with modest wealth. I’m about to slip into the living-room behind Vinny when an extraordinary thought strikes me – the little boy at the top of the stairs – the handsome, blond little sailor-boy – must be my father!

I turn round and run back up the stairs – but too late, the Autumn Leaves are already carpeting the stairs and the young sailor-boy is coming out of the second-best bedroom with tired eyes and thinning, greying hair and our ridiculous doorstep baby dribbling milky vomit on to his Shetland pullover. ‘Hello, Izzie,’ he says with his despondent smile, ‘what are you up to?’

‘Not a lot,’ I say with enforced cheerfulness. If I told him the truth he would never believe me. Soon we will all be in the hands of the trick-cyclist.

‘How can you possibly know that? Where did you find it?’

‘On the first landing, in that dish on the window-sill.’ I know the one he means, a little Spode box with a lid on, but I’ve looked in there many times and there’s never been so much as an eyelash, let alone a lock of hair. ‘Maybe it’s materialized out of thin air,’ Charles says eagerly. ‘It’s like finding clues, isn’t it?’

‘Clues to what exactly?’

‘Her,’
he whispers as if we might be overheard. ‘Where she is.’ A lock of hair, a powder-compact, a twice-lost shoe and a strange smell – not much of a map. In court this evidence wouldn’t add up to a mother. It would add up to madness. I refuse to even touch the lock of hair. I don’t want a black curl, I want the whole Eliza, quick and breathing, an entire person inside her skin, the hair growing from roots on her head, the veins throbbing with robin-red blood. Why can’t I go back and find
her?

I’m trying to write an essay on
Twelfth Night
– ‘Appearances can be deceptive: discuss’. I like Shakespeare’s masquerading heroines, his Violas and his Rosalinds, if it came down to it I’d rather be one of them than a Hilary. If I was a Viola I would have a Sebastian to twin me, one face, one voice, one habit, but two persons (an apple cleft in two). Perhaps incest wouldn’t be so bad if it was with someone you were so close to. Malcolm Lovat, for example.

I’m reminded of Mr Primrose – Rosalind and Ganymede, Viola and Cesario – in the same body. I suppose it’s all a matter of perception really – what you see depends on what you think you’re seeing. And anyway, how can we tell if what we’re seeing is real? Reality seems to go out the window when perception comes in the door. And, if it comes right down to it, how do we know there’s such a thing as reality? Dearie, dearie me, soon I will be as solipsistic as Bishop Berkeley. Do
I
even know who I am? ‘To thine own self be true,’ Gordon says occasionally (although not lately). But to which one?

Twelfth Night,
I write with a sigh, with some difficulty because of the gloves, is about darkness and death – the music and the comedy only serve to highlight what lies beyond the pools of golden light – the dark, the inevitability of death, the way time destroys everything. (‘But, Isobel,’ my English teacher, Miss Hallam, protests kindly, ‘it’s one of his
lyrical comedies.’
)

If I could go back in time (which I can, of course, I know) and meet Shakespeare, I could ask him to verify my reading of the play. That would be a surprise for Miss Hallam – ‘Yes, Miss Hallam, but Shakespeare
himself says
that the
carpe diem
theme of
Twelfth Night
is, by definition, a morbid one …’ Of course, Miss Hallam would just think that I’m off my head.

I look out of the window at the bare black branches of the Lady Oak, scrimshawed against the ivory of a tea-time sky. Troops of crows are racing the twilight to reach the shelter of its branches. The rooks settle themselves quickly into the branches of the tree and when the last wing has been rustled into position and the last
caw
has faded beyond an echo, you wouldn’t know that the tree is full of birds unless you’d stood there yourself and watched them disguise themselves as black leaves.

Soon it will be the year’s midnight and I can feel the solstice blues coming on me. And the rain it raineth every day. I should be out amongst the Christmas lights of Glebelands, sitting in the Three Js Coffee Bar – even a milky coffee and a Blue Riband with Eunice would be preferable to this melancholy. I am made of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

I sink down on my back, cocooned in the eiderdown, drugged by boredom and cold, and comfort myself with imagining that this is St Agnes Eve – any minute my dream lover (Malcolm Lovat) will cross the threshold and ravish me and carry me away from this dreariness. On cue, there’s a knock at my bedroom door.

‘Come in,’ I shout hopefully, but it’s no dream lover, only Richard Primrose, standing in the doorway, shuffling his feet (a strange concept) nervously as if he needs to go to the toilet. ‘How did you get in here?’ I demand, startled by his extreme ugliness.

‘Your mum let me in,’ he says, aggrieved at being accused of breaking and entering.

‘My mum?’ I reply, startled for a moment until I realize he means the Debbie-mother.

‘Congratulations,’ Richard says awkwardly.

‘On what?’

‘The baby.’

‘The baby?’ I’m not at all sure we should be congratulated on the baby, its screams are even now bouncing off the flock wallpaper on the staircase below as if someone was about to cut it up and put it in a pie. ‘Is that why you’re here?’

‘No,’ he says gruffly and wrinkles his nose at the smell of sadness. ‘I was wondering if you wanted to go out?’

‘Go out?’ I echo blankly. (It’s pouring with rain, why would I want to go out?)

‘Go out,’ he repeats peevishly, enunciating the words loudly and clearly as if I might be a foreigner. Or an idiot. He’s staring so intently at a point behind my left shoulder that I turn round to see what, or who, is there. Nothing and nobody, needless to say.

‘Go out,’ I repeat cautiously. ‘Do you mean [surely not] on a date?’

‘Well,’ he says, looking sullen, ‘we don’t have to call it that if you don’t want to.’

A wave of mild hysteria begins to roll over me. ‘What shall we call it then? A fig? A prune?’ Richard flushes in an unattractive way that highlights his rampant acne and unexpectedly lurches towards me and pushes me down on my bed. He’s surprisingly heavy, he must be made of some dense alien material, I can feel the air being squeezed out of my lungs. He kisses me, if you can call it that, in a disgusting, slurpy, slippery kind of way, trying to push his tongue up against the portcullis of my teeth. Where’s a time warp when you need one? Or the Dog? Or a woodcutter?

When Richard’s tongue discovers my gums he starts getting very excited and he has to shift his position to accommodate a body part that’s swelling faster than yeast, giving me an opportunity to free my knee and jerk it into his bulky groin. He rolls off the bed and on to the floor, clutching his detumescence, before scrambling up and, spitting, ‘You bitch, I was going to invite you to a party, but I wouldn’t now if you paid me,’ and turns on his heel and stomps downstairs.

‘Drop dead,’ I shout after him. The unbelievable cheek of it – I would sooner have an amorous relationship with the Dog than Richard. Indeed, it makes you question why bestiality is so frowned upon and yet sexual intercourse with someone like Richard is considered perfectly
normal.