Masters of the House (16 page)

“Don't send me away!” was one of the things they distinguished in his mumbled protests. “Matthew, Annie, don't send me away from my little place here!”

“Don't you want to be well again, Dad?” they said urgently, but could see no sign that he did.

When the day came for his going away, Auntie Connie decided the best thing to do was to get the children out of the house entirely. It was a fine day in late July, and school had broken up. She gave Matthew and Annie five pounds and told them to take Greg and Jamie off to Roundhay Park for the day.

“We want to spare them any distress, don't we?” she said, though she didn't deceive them, and they realised that it was they, too, who were being spared.

When they got back their father was gone, and the little bedroom had been aired and spring-cleaned, though Auntie Connie said it should be kept exactly as it had been so that he would feel at home when he came back. That meant keeping there Gregory's discarded Postman Pat books and the posters for
The Railway Children
and
Mary Poppins.
Matthew realised that Auntie Connie, for one, didn't expect him to come back cured.

Dermot's going meant a very relaxed summer holiday for the children. It was almost like their last days as a real family, when their father had been away most of the time and their mother had been there as a stable centre. Auntie Connie filled that role very well, and it was clear that by the end of the holidays she would be completely accepted. Annie in particular came to love and cling to her, accepting her views, following her rules, referring to her all her perplexities. Matthew accepted her presence
gratefully, but he kept his innermost feelings shut up and warned Annie against confiding in her totally.

“
That
we've got to keep secret—always,” he insisted.

Both the elder children accepted that there was a lot of schoolwork to catch up on. One of the things that would have troubled them if they had had time to think about it during their time as masters of the house was the way they had gradually fallen behind their classmates at school. Matthew in particular was ambitious, though as yet in an unspecified direction, feeling he wanted to “make something of his life”—as his father, even before his madness, so obviously hadn't done. Since he was undecided what that “something” would be, he felt the need to learn as much as possible on as many subjects as possible. Annie fell behind because she had other, more important goals to aim at; but she was a child who valued the approval of her elders, and when the chance came to catch up with her fellows she seized it. The two hours a day were largely pleasurable, never merely a fag, and for the rest of the time they played hard, recognising that this could be a last late flowering of childhood, the sweeter for being unexpected.

They still, of course, did things around the house, as all elder children in big families do, as well as shopping and errands. Mrs O'Keefe wondered sometimes at the time it took them to shop at the supermarket until she realised that they walked to it along the Ring Road instead of going across the field. When she asked them why, Annie said she didn't much like sheep—she knew it was silly, but that was the reason. Mrs O'Keefe accepted their help and often listened to their opinions. She recognised that these were children who had of necessity grown up fast and had shouldered burdens long before they should have had to. She did not fence them round with too many of the unnecessary restrictions of childhood.

“Heavens above!” she exclaimed one evening when she was doing the ironing in the kitchen and the iron exploded in a dangerous-looking blue flash. “Haven't I been saying this auld thing was going to give up the ghost?”

“Are you hurt?” asked Annie anxiously, and she and Matthew ran over to see she was all right. She said that she'd had nothing worse than a bad turn.

“Mother used to say it was about to go,” said Annie.

“It can probably be mended,” said Matthew. “I think it's mainly the cord. We oughtn't to buy a new one unless we have to, because I think the washing machine's about to conk out.”

“Will you let me worry about things like that now?” said Auntie Connie with humorous resignation. “I've a bit of money of my own, and we're not going to want.”

“You shouldn't have to use your own money. And we might as well get it repaired if we can,” said Matthew, with childish persistence. “There's a man in Bramley Town Street Dad and Mum used to take things to.”

“You can take it to him tomorrow if you've a mind to,” said Auntie Connie. “There may be a year or two of life in it yet. That's an end to ironing for tonight, but it was almost finished anyway.”

Later that night, while Auntie Connie was boiling milk for their bedtime drink, Matthew and Annie talked over what they would do next day.

“I'm going to take it to Andy Patterson's,” Matthew said.

“Oh?”

“You can come,” he said solemnly, “but I don't think you should come in. I don't think he'd talk about
her
with a girl present.”

“I don't think he'll talk about his love life with a fourteen-
year-old boy anyway,” said Annie, stung into dismissiveness. “What are you going to say to him, ‘I hear you slept with Carmen O'Keefe, just like our dad did'? I think you should let it drop. It's in the past.”

“I have let it drop . . . only, this is an opportunity.”

“An opportunity for what?”

“To . . . well, to find out how she came to be killed.”

“I don't want to know. And what good would it do, us knowing? You can go on your own.”

So next morning Matthew shoved the iron into an old leather bag and took the canal path to Bramley. Walking gave him time to think, though the problem that Annie had alluded to—that of ever getting around to the subject he wanted to talk about—was a ticklish one, and he hadn't solved it by the time he left the towpath and went up the hill towards Bramley Town Street.

He had no idea where Andy Patterson's shop was, but he found it soon after he turned off Broad Lane. The centre of Bramley had been ruined some years before by local government vandals who had pulled down the old stone houses and shops and built a hideous shopping centre and dreary council flats in their place. Patterson's Electrical Store was in one of the few old buildings remaining, and its title was more ambitious than the reality. It was a second-hand and repair shop presenting a motley array of appliances and implements up for sale or in for repair. All the surfaces—floor, counter, workbench—presented a great jumble of wires, parts, batteries and valves. Matthew did not know this, but shops of this kind were doomed, as people found they preferred to chuck away and start again rather than repair what had gone wrong.

If Andy Patterson realised this, he was keeping very cheerful
about it. When Matthew had pushed open the door and made a path for himself through the debris up to the counter, he found a little gnome of a man, bald-headed, glinting of eye, sitting contentedly on the other side with the entrails of an ancient vacuum cleaner around him. If Matthew had been privy to Bramley gossip he would have known that women preferred not to go into Patterson's Electrical Store on their own. As it was, he registered almost subconsciously that Andy Patterson did not seem to conform to the usual pattern of Carmen O'Keefe's boyfriends.

“And what can I do for you?” the man asked with a friendly smile. Matthew rummaged in his bag.

“There's this iron—it sort of exploded last night.”

“Oh, aye, I can see that.” He examined it with an undoubtedly expert eye, squinting through thick spectacles. “Looks as if it's just the cord, but we should maybe have a look at its insides to see everything's safe. Dangerous things sometimes, are irons. Will you come back for it?”

“Could you possibly do it now? You see, I come from Rodley and I had to make the trip specially.”

“I could probably do that for you. I've only this old Hoover to puzzle my brains with. Sit you down.”

Matthew sat down on an old upright chair, considerately put there for waiting customers. The little gnome of a man began setting the Hoover pieces methodically around him on the floor, and Matthew could see that he was not only small but running to fat. He was just racking his brains how to start the conversational ball rolling when Andy Patterson began it for him.

“Well now, young man, you say you're not from round here?”

“No, I'm from Rodley. I walked along the canal.”

“Not often I get folks making the pilgrimage here all the way from Rodley.”

“They said you were good with old things.”

“Did they now?” Glint went the sharp little eyes. “Well, I'm always nice to pensioners, that's true, but I prefer a younger bit of skirt if I can get it.” He gave a tinkling little laugh at his own joke. “And how do you like to pass your time, young fellow?”

Matthew considered.

“Oh, I like a bit of football. I'm not so keen on cricket. . . . And I like the girls, too.”

It was just the right response. It was obviously the man's favourite subject. His face lit up.

“At your age, young man? Though now I come to remember, I was pretty interested myself when I was no older than you. . . . Oh, those were the days.” He gazed ahead for a moment. “There was more mystery then. How do you get that delicious sense of discovery if there's no mystery?”

“Is there a Mrs Patterson?” asked Matthew.

“There's one or two.” Andy Patterson shot a sly glance in Matthew's direction to see how he took this, then he grinned. “Oh, women are my downfall, no question of that. No—I tell a lie: not women, but wives.”

“Haven't you . . . stayed married, then?”

“Not on your life. The mistake was to get married, and it would have been a greater one to stay married! Either they've walked out on me or I've walked out on them.”

“I thought you were a Catholic.”

“Now who would have told you that?” he asked, genuinely surprised. “Oh, I was once, true enough. Brought up in the faith. But I don't think the Catholic faith is the right one for a happy-go-lucky chap like myself. It finds too many things that
you need to struggle against. In the end you give up the struggle and say ‘What the hell—I'm going to do what I enjoy doing, whatever the Fathers say.' Doing what I fancy has given me a lot of fun, a lot of pleasure—and a few scrapes and bloody noses too, but that's life, isn't it?”

“Doesn't it get . . . sort of dangerous, having lots of women? I mean, with husbands and that? And don't they get jealous of each other?”

“It can happen, young fellow—take it from me who knows!” He talked freely while his stubby finger poked around inside the iron. “The thing is to keep it all nice and free and easy. You're just in it for the fun, and she's just in it for the fun. She's not your exclusive property, and you're not her exclusive property. And neither of you is going to get plagued by fits of guilt because neither of you thinks it's anything to feel guilty about. Ah, young man, you find a woman like that and you find a treasure!”

“Did you ever find one like it?”

“I did, young fellow, I did.”

“And have you still . . . got her? I mean, are you still going with her?”

The little man scratched his bald head, while the other hand fetched from under the counter a new length of lead.

“No, to tell you the truth, I'm not. They say she's gone off with a rich admirer, but I wouldn't know the truth about that.”

“Didn't she tell you about him?”

“No, she didn't. But we were finished well before that. . . . Now I come to think about it, I'm contradicting my own advice when I tell you about her. Because the truth is I had to break with her—had no choice, not if I was to sleep easy of a night. I'm a pretty happy-go-lucky fellow, like I said, but I have my rules in life, and they may not be the Fathers' rules, but they're what I live by. I wouldn't do down a friend, and I wouldn't cheat
a customer, though I might cheat the tax man if I knew a good way to do it. . . . That kind of rule's what I'm talking about. . . .”

Matthew knew better than to interrupt, and in a moment he started up again.

“And I found that she hadn't got any rules—not just in the matter of having a bit o' fun, but not
any
rules. It was . . . unnerving, in a way. Not like anything I'd ever known. . . . And when she started hinting, pretending at first it was all a joke, about something she wanted me to do—not to do when we were having fun, I don't mean that, but . . . something else—and when it became less of a joke,
then
I got out.”

“Dropped her?”

“Aye. We never had words, but I just didn't call her any more. She got the message, I think, because she never called me. I just brought it to an end—sharpish!”

“What—?” began Matthew. The man snapped the base of the iron over the works and began screwing it vigorously.

“No more questions, young fellow! The less anyone knows about that, the better! Now, tell your mother that with the new lead I've put on and the tinkering I've done with the works, she'll have an iron that will go for another three or four years. That will be two pounds, young fellow, and a lot cheaper than a new one, eh? You never told me your name, by the way.”

“Michael Potter,” said Matthew quickly.

“Michael Potter from Rodley. Well, come back, young man, if you ever have anything else that's broken. Next time we'll talk about you.”

Matthew escaped from the ramshackle little shop and began the long walk with his burden. Many years later he said to Annie, “That was the day I began to understand.”

M
ATTHEW HAD PLENTY OF TIME
to nourish his suspicions during the rest of the school holidays but little chance to find out more about what had been going on in those months of his mother's last pregnancy. For a while he brooded, getting nowhere. The fact that it was holiday time meant that he was unable to consolidate his acquaintanceship with Peter Leary. They were not of an age, so going to see him at his home was out. After a week he snapped out of his mood. With the elasticity of youth he threw himself into his usual leisure pursuits, playing casual football with boys in the neighbourhood, bicycling to the woods at Calverley, organising picnics. Auntie Connie had registered his mood and felt it wisest to let him cope with it as best he could. She registered, too, when he came out of it, and was glad.