If you walk down Britford Lane …

No, walk with me down Britford Lane. Can you remember the whaler by the Sea Scouts’ hut and the echoes under New Bridge and the slimy island water rats? (They’re just rats, really.) And what about the sleek MGs in Furlong’s showroom: they were all polish and clean oil – smell it still? Can you? Can you remember? Did you follow me the way I came, past Arms’s corner shop and Sid the butcher’s and through the car park of The Swan (you’ve got gravel in your shoes)? Arms is dead and his daft son too, both proof that shock-frizz hair does not mean genius; Sid must be 80, if he’s still with us, bless his chops, bless his kidneys, he knew his Vernon’s – he cried when Duncan Edwards died, was most upset anyway; The Swan is The Grey Fisher now (and that’s a steak you’re eating). With me? Were you with me then? There was a house whose thatch was poured honey, there was another in whose garden sat an old man with purple sporades on his pate watching tits and finches peck at rinds, at bricks of lard – he was pining for his wife and he never felt the cold.

It was always cold down Britford Lane. There was always sleet down there; the morse babble of heaven’s waste blew across the edge of town. The horses wore blankets all the year, they stood forlorn among henges of hay. The fields flooded, the cricket hut was skew from rot, the midden gleamed with frost at noon, ice-panes glazed the puddles in the unmade road, trees groaned, little ducks died because spring didn’t show when it should have: there were always cyclonic recidivists, isobarbarians, rolling in from the north, the east, one of those points, at it again despite their previous. Codeine mist rose from Navigation Straight to show its line across the fields.

It was always damp down Britford Lane. Broken willows, all black with fungus, sprawled like dead mendicants in the boggy meadows; it was bad for your chest, buggered your bronchioles, brought on lumbago.

When The Grieving Widow cycled back to this place where she’d brought her Eddie (she had no choice) she wheezed and coughed and the rubber grips didn’t mitigate the jarring of her cold bones. All the bobbing dynamo-light picked out was the floury fog, the sauce that settled nightly round their little home, she never saw another man’s sperm so long as she lived. She got saddle satisfaction instead: that’s what the Tap Room Chaps at the White Jam Tart sniggered during their sessions. She cycled past houses with their own roof, past houses which shared a roof, past houses whose roof had (Eddie said) been put on too soon. Theirs was one of these: no topping windows (all talk of suicide was of course proscribed); eaves that an adult could reach with hardly a leap; no stairs – so, if a little boy enters the naphthalic darkness of his mother’s wardrobe and revels in the disorienting forest of fur and crêpe de chine and then teeters back into the light high on the heels she never wears now there’s no chance of a mortal tumble, he simply falls into his mother’s arms as she comes in the front door rouged by the cold, puffed, shiny with droplets and love. She kneels on the scraped parquet by the door to her bedroom, by the front door, by the door to the living room – they’re that close these doors. And the one to her room is the one to Eddie’s too: that’s his bed by the window, and every morning (after dreams where his father is throwing him high and not being there to catch him) he stumbles from the soaked sheets and wipes himself with the dry part of his pyjama trousers and lies beside his mother who’s twice as warm as he is and ready to clutch him without waking.

She put the back of the bike inside the porch to keep the precious saddle dry for morning and opened the door. Eddie looked like his face had been food-mixed, and she gasped in the micromoment before she twigged – lipstick. Then she sighed and dropped to her knees, not far, either from the bathroom or kitchen doors – this was a very small dwelling: count the rooms on the fingers of a deformed hand. There was no room for a live-in, no money moreover (he died in debt, he left them bills and paper trouble). There was no money even for an orphan from a firebombed home on the Elbe, the sort of girl who’d cross Europe for the promise of a daily crust – they didn’t come cheaper. They did, oh they did. The sort of girl there was money for was Stella who had abandoned her four-year-old charge half an hour before his mother returned in order to meet a bombadier in the scrumpy bar by the bus station. The Grieving Widow expected nothing but stupidity and negligence of the girl. She had born two illegits (not cognate with git, or get, a whore’s whelp) by the age of seventeen.

The first died; Stella wasn’t to know that the hospital door outside which she left the mewling boy in a pillow-case one February night was bolted, that the kitchen staff entered by a different wing. Probation.

The second, a girl, and the issue of her union with either a coalman or ‘a fellow from out Grateley’, was taken for adoption. None of this saddened Stella or quashed her eagerness to please; no doubt she pleased her bombadier before he caught the last bus to Larkhill – if she pleased him too long he’ll have had to steal a car.

She had certainly pleased Eddie when she got him home from school. The Grieving Widow was kneeling again, dabbing at the boy’s face with cold cream and cottonwool, when he leant ever so slightly forward with bulbous cheeks and bombed eyes and vomited onto her chest. No warning. The lumpy gut-mix stuck to her jersey, miraculously transformed oatmeal wool into steaming porridge. This was Stella’s doing; Eddie was the agent, the gastric timebomb she had witlessly rigged.

Mother and son cried. The one provoked the other, the sotto sob precedes the howl. When routine’s dam fractured she always did the same, she always cried, she was that tense, that brittle, she lacked elastic, was in servitude to her daily design, was fuelled by nicotine and scratching. And Eddie cried because he’d made her cry, because he was ashamed he’d done that. He tried to comfort her, the sick stuck to his shirt and so they both had to change – he didn’t know all petticoats were not so frayed as hers. She made him eat plain toast for his tummy. The larder was a baby green baby coffin; she sought margarine to spread on her wedge of toast.

There was none, there was never much, this wasn’t like the big cold coffin that the other Vallenders, the proper Vallenders had: the refrigerator of my dead husband’s brother’s wife purrs in endless plenitude while this cantilevered box with an airbrick in its back is mute with want and its flymesh is redundant. Still, there had been some marge there that morning, without question there had because a) it always lasted till Thursday when Arms’s shopboy Vivian brought the order in a reeking carbolic box that she’d cut up to insulate the roof; b) she would otherwise have checked in her purse that she had enough to buy more at lunchtime, and then would have spent the morning worrying about her coming profligacy; c) she could picture the plate (Poole Pottery, chocolate and turquoise, cracked) and the greaseproof refolded over most of a half-pound block.

‘Oh Eddie – where is the margarine?’ An inch of detumescent ash fell from in front of her face, Eddie tried to pick it from the crazed lino and dispersed it, she rubbed her wedding ring against her chronically sore red finger.

Eddie said: ‘I drank it Mumma.’

Stella had said: ‘Not much milk there isn’t Eddie – wan’ tea?’

Eddie told her he wanted melted margarine because he liked the taste of it on his curly kale; so Stella put it in a saucepan, with the handle of course protruding at Eddie’s head height, and when it began to boil poured it in a navvy mug that The Grieving Widow had found in the lane and used for Eddie’s painting water (you’ll be there the day that Eddie drinks his painting water, I was there). Stella watched Eddie ingest the variably dense oils – a section through the navvy mug shows strata of spectral sludge from window grey to grainy manilla. Then Eddie watched her stretch her lips till she was toothless and fellate a lipstick that she coaxed from its gold tin prepuce.

‘I got’, she said – and here she moues at the mirror, ‘to meet this chap. ‘E’s gettin’ ’is stripe soon. Like that did you?’

Eddie’s lips were greasy too; he followed Stella down the twilit path to the old wicket gate that crumbled as he clung to it. The hinges bubbled with rust, the paint sloughed, the wood was halva.

‘She’ll be in in jus’ a jiff, yer mum.’

Stella stumbled down the lane, between the ramparts of the hedges, cursing the puddles, huddled in her collar, hurrying after the place where the lamplight started, further down the lane. When she was inside it Eddie shivered and turned to face his little home, lit like a pumpkin. He went and dressed as Stella’s ape, painted himself too.

The Grieving Widow sought the secret sore on her scalp that she had made by chronic scratching and scratched it again; it yielded blood-smeared scabs beneath her nails. She feared she would drive herself bald: the hairless clearing grew from tooth-size to sixpence-size during the first year of her widowhood, the skinflakes grew proportionately, dandruff to seborrhoea. And the more she worried the more it itched and the more care she took to dissemble this willed alopecia with hanks held against the current of her crown by grips that fell about her neck when she began to scratch again.

She scratched with her cigarette hand, said to Eddie: ‘She, she’ll have to go.’ She kidded herself that she had the choice – she hadn’t; and to say such a thing was to punish Eddie who loved Stella, revelled in the two hours he spent with her each afternoon (this day had, truly, been exceptional), and hoped that she would marry him. He hoped his lack of stripe would not disqualify him, consoled himself with the knowledge that it had many years to grow, and wondered if the proscription on sliding down banisters in Bonnie’s parents’ house, or in my parents’ house, or in any house where he furtively compensated for his lack of domestic opportunity, was prompted by this practice’s harm to the developing stripe. The rectitude of this notion became sure.

He asked my father: ‘Do you ever slide down banisters?’ No.

He asked me, in my father’s presence. No, of course not.

He must have tried to picture his own father’s back, to recapture the downs and downy mountains of begetting flesh above a series of stretched waistbands, to summon the image of the stripe that indeed proceeded with vertical authority up the middle, paler than the rest and lumpy with subcutaneous bumps. Thus he conceived an antipathy to banisters (and to stairs, tree-houses, ladders, diving boards, double decker buses) that matched his fear of shoes and wallets made from reptiles’ skins. And he became proud of the rented bungalow; he boasted about its exotic etymology and Bengali origins, though it lacked even a verandah.

He fixed my father’s eye and told him: ‘Bungalows don’t need stairs.’

He even blamed Stella’s accident on the stairs in her mother’s house, on the single flight she mostly missed out on the way from up there to down here where she lay whining and bleeding and drunk. Everyone blamed the drink. Eddie knew everyone was wrong, drink didn’t break bones and make haemorrhages. It was risers, treads, carpets, it was floors which accelerated towards you that did the damage, that got in their retaliation for the constant pedal assault made on them. Poor Eddie held Stella’s hand and the woman in the next bed – was that ash smeared on her face? – tried to smile at him; the ward was full of women whose faces were wrong, and they were all turned towards him.

He mimicked his mother’s action when he had dyspepsia and rubbed his palms on Stella’s tummy: ‘Ooh Eddie tha’s so nice … so warm your hands are. Real hot they are.’

One of the women smirked. The Grieving Widow came back into the ward having nipped out for a gasper: ‘We’d better be on our way Eddie … let Stella get some rest.’ Eddie trailed beside his mother down the ranks of beds looking back at Stella whose tummy flushed with thermal balm long after he’d gone.

Eddie and his mother got off the bus at New Bridge Road near the allotments and Eddie wondered if it was there, among the hurdles and bean poles and giant-leafed rhubarb and tiny huts and corrals of compost and tufty causeways, that he might start to look for the baby that Stella had lost.