Man at the Helm (9 page)

At tea we had tinned peaches and custard with hundreds-and-thousands sprinkled on top. Mr Longlady kept referring to it as trifle – which it wasn’t – and Miranda advised us not to have too much or we might puke up. There was no sign of the baked goods advertised the day before by Mrs Longlady.

I looked at the two Longlady girls across the tea table. They really didn’t look identical; they only looked, to me, slightly similar – as if they were ordinary sisters or cousins. Miranda had thin lips – barely any lip at all on the outside – and you could always see how well she’d cleaned her teeth, or not. Whereas Melody had plump, juicy lips and you could hardly see her teeth at all. Plus Miranda was taller than Melody and her ears poked through her hair at the sides.

I always felt sorry for Melody constantly being called ‘identical’ to Miranda with her thin lips. It’s a wonder she didn’t beg her parents to stop saying they were identical. I could see that Miranda, on the other hand, was keen to be presented as identical to Melody, who was quite reasonable-looking, comparatively. Miranda would often say, ‘No one can tell us apart.’ And you’d see Melody looking fed up.

Before we’d properly finished, Mr Longlady had had enough of Miranda’s trying behaviour and cleared the table. We sat around the table for a few minutes with Miranda pontificating, when some music drifted in. It was a soft, slow violin with an insistent piano underneath. We all of sudden went quiet and began to listen. And then, to our astonishment, Miranda began
to cry, not sniffling and tears but the paced, empty sobs of a fake. My sister and Little Jack knew it and stared at her coldly. Melody, however, was terribly affected by her sister’s performance and began to cry for real, producing tiny chokes.

‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Melody cried through her little chokes.

Miranda wouldn’t say for some moments.

‘Is it the music?’ Melody asked.

It wasn’t the music, though. Apparently it was Bufo, my frog puppet, which she’d laughed at not twenty minutes before. Now she was cradling it and gazing into its eyes.

‘It’s practically identical to the one my grandfather gave me for my birthday when I was six,’ she was finally able to say. ‘Just before he died … and it … it got lost,’ she sobbed out.

I wanted to snatch Bufo away from her, but it would have seemed callous.

Bufo actually belonged to our mother. Her father had brought him back from a faraway place at the end of the war when our mother was only tiny (possibly along with the Indian boxes we ruined during our laundry misadventures). He’d brought curious things like bullets and animal teeth for her older brothers and illustrated playing cards and marbles with strange colours running through. But for our mother he’d brought a work of art. A polished wooden frog puppet with beautifully intricate jointed legs and bulging eyes that moved. Our mother had wanted to call him Frog but her father had already named him Bufo, and though he wouldn’t have minded the change she kept it as Bufo.

‘May I keep him for a day or two, Miss Muffet?’ Miranda said, looking at Bufo and touching his eyeballs. ‘
Pleeease
.’

‘He belongs to our mother, really,’ I said, looking at my sister, imploring her to put a stop to it.

‘I shall cherish him and guard him and I shan’t let anything bad happen to him, I promise, Miss Muffet, I swear on my own mother’s deathbed.’

I absolutely did not want to let her have him, but my courage deserted me and I found myself thinking perhaps it wouldn’t hurt and that she would surely be nicer to me if I said yes. But I knew it was wrong and that I should say no. Bufo was all our mother had left from her father, since my sister and I had destroyed the Indian boxes.

My sister got up and spoke to Miranda. ‘You can borrow Bufo for a very short while, that’s all,’ she said. ‘Not for long.’

Miranda looked at me and smiled triumphantly.

‘Thank you, Miss Muffet,’ she said with a shrewish smile, and waved one of Bufo’s little front legs. ‘Goodbye, Miss Muffet,’ she ventriloquized on behalf of Bufo.

Mr Longlady reappeared then and said it was time for us to go home, so we did.

So we got on with life and other things and had regular, though not frequent, pill trips to Devonshire Place in London. The woman Julia, who’d looked out of Dr Gilbey’s upstairs window when we’d first gone and given me the orange squash, seemed pleased to see us each time and offered us more squash and mysterious little biscuits of a type we’d never seen before – dark, crisp and sugary but not much to them, so that you couldn’t help taking another and another and another until there was nothing but a dusting of the fine rusty-coloured sugar on the pretty plate and sometimes, as we left, I would run my finger through that. So nice were they that I could almost taste them as we alighted from the train each time at St Pancras.

My sister and I enjoyed our London trips and looking back I think they were quite educational. We took detours to important places such as Madame Tussaud’s before going on to collect the pills from Devonshire Place. Collecting the pills became a minor little thing at the end of a day out. We became good at hailing a taxi as we walked along pavements and took turns walking backwards at busy times. And we learned not to panic if it seemed we were running late, because you didn’t have to wait at a taxi rank, you could hail one almost anywhere (unlike a bus or a train). We (eventually) realized we were expected to give the taxi driver approximately 10 per cent more than the fare, money-wise.

My sister asked a nice-seeming driver what we might be doing to make previous cabbies swear at us when they set us
down. The nice-seeming driver was appalled that we didn’t know about tipping and explained the whole system. We tipped him and he said, ‘Take care, gels’ in the London style, which was a bit different from the driver before who’d called us a pair of fucking bitches. The rule was: 10 per cent unless you have loads of luggage, then 15 per cent, or 20 per cent if you’re foreign. Which I have always adhered to since.

One time we approached Dr Gilbey’s office on Devonshire Place on foot and from a different direction, having been to see the Wallace Collection nearby, which we’d heard about from our mother who described it as ‘a most romantic and sensual collection’. My sister and I hadn’t realized it was going to be a picture gallery and were expecting a small zoo.

On this day we were after a bowl of soup before calling for the pills. We were hungry and running early for once (the Wallace Collection being quicker to look at than the two hours we’d allowed) and we found a small café with high stools along a window-ledge and went inside. The menu was quite unusual to our eyes. My sister said it must be Spanish because of all the unusual things chalked up on a blackboard, including osso buco and a sandwich with pimientos. That and the shiny black hair of the waiters. But they did have cheese on toast and they did have soup (oxtail), so we had one of each. And shared and wished we’d just had two soups, the cheese on toast being like nothing we’d ever seen before – except candle wax – and the bread hardly toasted at all. We learned that Heinz soup is a safe bet in a strange café.

In other words, we learned bits about London (taxis = tipping), about art and culture (Wallace Collection = picture gallery) and about life in general (Heinz soup = safe).

One time, on the outward journey, we were stopped by a nosy and bored policeman before we’d even got on the train at
Leicester station and we told a white lie to get rid of him quickly. And that turned out to be the wrong thing to do, though not as wrong as telling the truth would have been. It would have been better to have told darker lies (such as we were meeting someone off the train) or not to have been in the situation in the first place. We told him we were going to London to see our father (which was half untrue). My sister had hidden the pill and zoo money down her sock just in case we got searched.

The policeman didn’t like our attitude, not that we’d been rude but my sister had told him not to worry about us and that had made him worry (it’s always the way), and he asked us to accompany him into an office just off the platform where he made us answer a whole lot of questions about who we were, the purpose of our visit, how old we were, what we were up to. The policeman looked for our number in the telephone directory but it wasn’t listed because of our mother being female and he thought we were fobbing him off with false identities. Then he realized we were claiming to be the children of Edward Vogel of H. Vogel & Company and he obtained our telephone number a different way via Charles Street and rang our home. We heard his side of the conversation with our mother.

‘I’ve got two juveniles here going off to London by train. Are you aware of this, madam? … I see, and you’re consensual with that, are you, madam?’

While this conversation dragged on, the clock ticked and time went by and I realized our train was on the platform. I pointed to the clock on the office wall and then to the doorway but the policeman closed the door with his toe.

He frowned, phone to his ear, listening to our mother.

‘Well, that is curious, madam. The older one has stated to me that they’re meeting with their father at St Pancras station in London.’

I tapped his arm. He looked away. ‘I see, madam.’

We missed the train. I heard it pull away and I began to cry.

The policeman said, ‘Your mum wants a word.’

My sister took the phone.

‘Yes. We’ve missed it,’ she said. ‘Sorry. OK, so shall we come home?’

We caught the next train but had to skip the zoo.

My high hopes for the pills were eventually dashed and I had to agree with my sister that all the pills in the world couldn’t stop our mother from being sad and writing her play. To be honest, it seemed as though the more pills we got, the more acts appeared.

So it was time for the next man on the list. We’d set our hearts on a very nice man called Phil Oliphant who lived in the village and loved horses, whom I may have mentioned before. My sister had met him by accident when looking for a new pony for herself, and he’d been the perfect mix of nice, handsome and horse-loving and even had wrought-iron gates on his driveway with a horse-head motif.

But we were stalling on Phil Oliphant because (
a
) he was too good to mess up and (
b
) his name was Phil, but mainly (
c
) our mother wasn’t ready for a new man encounter with it being spring, her worst season bar winter, and a time when she hardly wanted to leave the house, let alone have sex with a horse-lover.

We resorted to interacting with the play, listening to new scenes, listening again to old scenes, listening to edited scenes and acting it out. We even wrote some poems to sprinkle in amongst the drama. One of mine was a true story about a lost guinea pig who had run down a rat hole and hadn’t come out again, even with a parsley lure. It was awful, awful, awful. Three awfuls.

Our mother knew how bad I felt because I was usually very brave and good at dusting myself down and marching on, but this guinea pig thing had made me feel dreadful because I blamed myself. Our mother said that bad things of our own doing are the hardest type of bad thing to get over. She knew this – most of the bad things in her life having been her own fault.

Our mother said that writing a poem about it might help. It didn’t help because it got me thinking about what might have happened (inside the rat hole), whereas before writing the poem I was just sad to have lost the guinea pig and blamed myself for letting him run away. And that showed me how powerful poems can be. In a bad way. And I suppose, if I’m being fair, in a good way too.

Our mother called poems ‘pomes’, whereas we said ‘po-ims’. That irritated me almost as much as the sadness they caused. Anyway, we soon got sick of the plays and the poems and we became reckless. We’d always said we’d avoid inviting our schoolteachers to have sex with our mother because it could get awkward – in fact it was one of our two golden rules. But in desperation to break the play cycle my sister sent an invitation to a young man called Mr Dodd, Little Jack’s teacher.

He was young. So young, he wasn’t even married – just engaged. We knew Mr Dodd wouldn’t make a very good husband for our mother (he was a teacher, her worst type of person, plus a bit of a sissy), but we needed to do something to cheer her up and he did have a sweet face, being Spanish on his mother’s side, and linguistic skills. And we needed a rehearsal in the run-up for the attempt on the very nice and pony-loving Phil Oliphant.

Dear Mr Dodd,

Please would you come and talk to me about Little Jack’s stammer. I gather there’s not much to be done except to be patient
and not get angry, but I want to make absolutely sure I’m doing all I can as his only visible parent. It is imperative to help all we can.

Please come one evening and we can discuss over a drink of wine, whisky or squash (your choice).

 

Yours,

Elizabeth Vogel

Mr Dodd called in later that week and the visit went much better than we’d dared to hope. After a brief chat about speech therapy, and two glasses of whisky plus the availability of a plate of cheeselets – which they didn’t touch – they seemed to have sex in our mother’s sitting room in front of the fire. We peeped through the French windows. Mr Dodd definitely had his trousers at least down and maybe right off.

It turned out badly, though, in the long run because he only wanted to do it the once and she kept pestering him – by telephone – to come round again and became very upset when he didn’t and wrote a play about it. Not the usual one act, but a whole long drama in the Rattigan mould. Poignant and cringe-making.

Mr Ladd: I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression.

Adele: You gave me the impression that you were a nice person.

Mr Ladd: I’m engaged to be married.

Adele: You didn’t mind being engaged on Friday evening.

Mr Ladd: I couldn’t resist your beauty after you’d given me all that whisky.

Adele: I’m a bit worried about Little Jack’s stammer.

Mr Ladd: Jack doesn’t have a stammer.

Adele: What? You think I invented my own son’s speech impediment?

Mr Ladd: I don’t know.

Adele: (
calls loudly
) Jack,
Jack
, come in here, will you?

It was disappointing that Mr Dodd – who was meant to prevent the writing of the play – caused such a concerted bout of writing. But it taught us an important lesson and we never again had anything to do with teachers.

Soon afterwards, just as our mother was beginning to feel better about Mr Dodd not wanting to have sex with her again, our gardener, Mr Gummo, came to speak to her in confidence. He’d heard some ‘nasty rumours’ and didn’t feel comfortable with knowing and not telling her about them etc. Mr Gummo was one of those people who always have to do the right thing – however brutal and upsetting. And then, as if to make up for it, he created a beautiful rockery to cover an unsightly manhole in our front garden that she’d been asking him to do for ages and he’d always refused, for sensible reasons. He planted miniature alpine saxifrage and thrift among a scattering of craggy rocks and said it was meant to resemble Switzerland in the springtime. Our mother was utterly thrilled with it and said it was worthy of Chelsea.

It went against Mr Gummo’s better judgement – to cover a mains drain like that – and he made it clear to us that access might be needed at some point in the future and that would mean hurriedly removing it and we all accepted the fact. Our mother gave him a pay rise for doing the rockery, for overruling common sense in the name of beauty and, I suppose, for telling her about the nasty rumours and not minding. We added him to the list.