She rented a small Victorian house with a garden that ran down to the river. Most of the furniture was secondhand from a nearby auction room and the carpet from a warehouse, where the underlay was free. That first Saturday they went to the lane where the gypsies had stalls, to get bits and pieces. She bought a barrel for wood and stacked it with jugs, cups, saucers, a soup tureen, a cutlery box, and odd glasses, including some beautiful cranberry ones. Tristan put his hands on his hips, assumed a worried expression, and said plaintively, “What’s worrying me is, who’s going to pay for this big deal?” One of the luxuries was a lamp with a milky glass stem, inside which a mermaid was suspended. The woman who served her gave her a lace runner for luck.
“You take care of those little chaps and forget all about him,” the woman said with a certain archness. She was a large, strong-featured woman with gold flecks in her eyes, and it being winter, she wore a woollen shawl over her shoulders. Her stall was freezing, and in between serving customers, she sat with her mittened hands by an oil heater. She told fortunes, said she would be able to tell Nell’s at the end of the day.
“See what the crystal shows up,” she said, and pointed to a drawn curtain that led from the back of the stall to a crammed cubby with two orange boxes, makeshift seats.
“I think I’ll leave it,” she said, too frightened to hear about either past or future, because she was living in this frozen haze, like the mermaid in her sphere of glass.
The woman saw things anyhow, saw the little house that they lived in, the path and the missing diamond in the stained-glass fan; saw much more, but did not voice it then.
Often at night Nell would dream that they had been taken and would rush to their room to find them sleeping, the bedclothes slung in all directions, their faces warm and infinitely delicate, like filament. Her mother had helped her with money until, as she said, she “got going.” She had sent tablecloths and knickknacks along with cakes and eats. The boxes would reek of the smell of rich plum cake, with brandy or sherry douched over it. Even the postman remarked on it: “It’s like Christmas.” She put a slice in the greaseproof paper for him the next day, and so touched was he that he launched into a rigmarole about his first ulcer, then the world at large, especially football hooligans, how they were destroying the great name of England, tarnishing the name of King Harry, his solution being to put them all in a pound, strip them, allow them to fight it out until they were mangled or dead. Looking past her into the hall, with its little bamboo table on which rested a pot of African violets, he said, “Nice house, nice furnishings, nice lady.” Nice lady! She had no idea how she seemed to others—did she look young, old, bedraggled? She’d certainly got thinner, and her hair drawn back severely made her look serious. It was as if she wanted to look like that, to atone.
Yes, the parcel or a registered letter from her mother arrived faithfully, the letters tugging at her. She would read about tillage, animals, and deaths, so many deaths. Often the ink would be a different colour towards the bottom of the page, a weaker colour where her mother had added water, and this, too, brought to mind the grim reality, money and so forth, her mother’s plight; they had had to sell cattle to send the money for Nell to put down on the house, the ties deepening with each bulletin. Yes, her mother dilating on funerals, the size of them, the flowers, the mourners, including those who came from afar, the nature of the deaths themselves, the sudden ones and the lingering ones. Cancer was rife, taking root in every woman’s body, cancer which her mother referred to as growths, the word itself being too shocking to express. Even women who lived up the mountains suffered from these mysterious growths, women who ate wholesomely, never touched a drink, and slaved all their lives. So it was a woman’s ailment. Her mother often expressed the hope that they would be buried together. Buried? She was thinking of living, thinking in secret of a man who would come and whisk her to altitudes of happiness. This man had no features which she could describe, or as yet no name, but he was in the universe, waiting for the moment to materialise, the ordained moment. On such imaginings she got by. “I’ll come back and see you one day,” she whispered to the gypsy woman.
“I’d like to help you,” the woman said. She meant it. There was about her something compassionate, something rooted, and Nell felt teary, missing the mother she had not had, who like the approaching man would vivify her dreams.
Proud of their possessions they hauled them up the crowded lane past stalls crammed with novelties: silver, gold, pewter, samovars, tea sets begging to be used, tapestries, rugs, and humbler things such as saucepans and wooden spoons, each stall a little repository of stories. At the end of the lane, as they waited for the bus, Tristan bought a slab of very white cheese, which he ate as if it were an ice-cream wafer. Sitting on the rim of the laden barrel, she felt an enormous surge of happiness, as if she was on the brink of a fresh life, what with voices all around, calling, joking; stall owners starting to pack up, youngsters sweeping the rinds and rubble of the day, women wrapping precious glasses in sheaves of newspaper, others making dates to go to this pub or that, and still another telling how she had had a shawl nicked when she turned her back; stories streaming in, like the sun itself, the stuff of life. The thing she must do is make new friends and banish the ogres of the past.
In the evenings she read manuscripts for the publishing house where she worked, to supplement her budget. Most were cries for help. One woman had hidden a letter in between the pages in which she confessed her unhappiness, told how her husband, who loved her very much, had thrown himself off Tyne Bridge, and was asking the world, asking any stranger, how this fatality could happen. A few of the novels she had been sent, too few, had that sacred breath of otherness that she believed to be essential.
“Can I have the blue glass bowl?” Paddy said, tapping her marriage ring. For some reason she still wore it. More atonement.
“What for?” she asked, surprised.
“My experiments,” he said. He had brought home a fletch of frog spawn and by a method known only to himself was hoping to breed a unique species of singing frog.
“Of course,” she said. Sometimes he looked at her with such need, a gaze saying, “Pay attention to me,” and in those moments she knew that everything that had happened had marked him and made him needy. There were his years of asthma, his head clogged up, eyes watery, a smothered look to him, as if he were still inside her, gasping to get out. With him, her firstborn, she had always been more unsure, and he knew it. Perhaps it is always so. Moreover, he claimed that he discerned the moment when his brother was conceived, saw his father touch her, then lay her down on the sheepskin before the fire, a moment of passion after a journey she had made to her family, a moment of reconciliation and incarnation. Had she loved her husband then? She did not know. She did not know herself; her emotions were all tangled and she yearned now for a massive love.
“It’s wonderful that your asthma has gone,” she said to allay his fears.
“I still get it, but I don’t complain,” he said.
“Fibber … fibber,” Tristan said.
“Buck Arab,” Paddy said, and then words and accusations flew back and forth between them, like daggers, their tempers rising as they gave vent to these raw murderous feelings, looking at her from time to time for the moment when they might have gone too far, and looking also to see who was sovereign in her eyes. Often she felt as if she were being halved, each side of her ebbing, ebbing towards each one of them.
War games were the highlight of their week. On Sundays, friends from their new school would converge, carrying toy guns, catapults, or some sort of military garb. They clustered round the so-called armoury while they formed sides and debated whether they would fire blanks or real bullets. Then it was cries of “Charge! Charge!” with the house and the garden full of the rattle of artillery as they ran about shouting, “Keep down!” or “Cover,” followed by a fusillade of sticks and stones.
Everything shook from their onslaughts. The stained glass above the hall door wobbled as if it might shatter and the bannister of the stairs became permanently askew. Even the cranberry glasses on the sideboard trembled and gave out an eerie, drawn-out tinkle. They wrecked flowers too, chrysanthemums, as it happened, planted by a previous owner. They lopped the heads off and tossed them like blunderbusses. The tawny colour of the chrysanthemums reminded her of her mother’s Rhode Island Red hens. She would write to her mother that night, not one of those stilted letters saying “I am telling nothing,” but a real letter in which she would describe the house, the path leading up to it, the rooms, the bits and pieces she had bought at the market, plus her mother’s gifts, especially the bedspreads, pale green with candlewick roses.
That Sunday they had ordered drop scones, sausage rolls, anchovy toast, and chocolate pudding laced with rum. They had got the word “laced” from somewhere and were using it indiscriminately. Another word was “tippy.” They liked the taste of drink and on Sundays they went with her to the pub garden when she had a beer. She thought it was a way of getting to know people, except that mostly people came with their own groups and those who wanted to get to know her were strays, especially a man with a patch over one eye who cadged drinks and talked about friends on the turf. The tea that she had so lengtheningly and lovingly prepared for them was downed in gulps, and so seriously did the nature of the game affect them that the hostilities were carried on, so that they sat on opposite sides of the long refectory table, sat as rival armies might, only to insult the other side and vow fresh carnage. Paddy tried to make peace and cited the fact that enemy soldiers across narrow boundaries and borders always made peace on Christmas Day and broke bread.
“Well, it’s not Christmas Day, smartie,” Tristan said, and his gang leapt up and banged their utensils to reaffirm their appetite for war.
By the time it was dusk, the game had reached a crescendo and the next-door neighbours had called to complain. Always towards dusk a greater frenzy possessed the children, because they knew that parents would soon be coming and that their adventures would cease. Their thinking, unlike her own, did not stretch to the next Sunday or the one after; they hollered and battled only for the moment. A neighbour rang to say the noise was intolerable and had caused his wife a migraine, so that Nell went out and begged them to go quietly. To appease her, they began to move like wraiths, creeping through the side door, ducking down the well of the stairs, their shouting replaced by a silent code, meaningful only to them. It was in this hush that he came in, her husband, tall, overquiet, and autocratic.
“So this is how they spend their Sundays,” he said, pleased at having caught her out in such remiss.
“It’s only a game,” she said, removing her apron in a gesture of propitiation, or maybe even vanity.
“It’s only a game,” he said, and nabbed Derwent, a friend who was ducking out, ordering him to please send his sons in. Derwent was a very thin boy, with all the hesitancy of a doe, and her favourite because she knew that he guessed how frightened she was of her husband.
“A game today, an actuality tomorrow; what do you want them to become, gangsters?” he said, and then from his wallet he took a jotting pad to make note of something which she believed she would hear in one of the many bulletins that he sent, pointing out yet again how unfit she was to be a mother. The kitchen, strewn with litter, bits of breads, stones, chocolate crumbs, and some of the splinters that they had carefully shaved for their bows and arrows, did seem a wreck.
Paddy and Tristan appeared, their faces crimson from the excitement of the day, scare in their eyes. Tristan came first, as he always did, his grin slightly merry, slightly jaunty, saying “I am not going to show fear, I will not cower.” Paddy lagged behind, afraid that he was going to get most of the blame as he was the elder. At their father’s request they went with him to the front room, while Derwent sat at the kitchen table funnelling caster sugar with a little silver scoop. He collected it in the scoop, then let it slide in the hollow that he made between thumb and forefinger. His hands were filthy, but she did nothing to stop him. They were like two miscreants afraid to speak. Sometimes she went to the door of the sitting room to listen, but did not dare to put her ear to the door in case her husband opened it and found her out in something disgraceful.
Parents came and collected their children, thanking her, and then she went back to the kitchen, where Derwent scooped, and once for no reason ran up to her bedroom and without turning on the light put on some lipstick. She wanted to seem in control of herself. But Derwent knew better. He kept laughing to himself. He was happy to be spending the night with them. His mother had given birth to a baby, her fifth child. The baby was born in the afternoon and the phone call had come to the house about six. It was a girl and weighed just under seven pounds. She had told him it was a girl, but so busy was he with his campaign he did not appear to hear.
“What do you feel about this baby, Derwent?’ she asked eventually, for something to say.
“Nothing,” Derwent said, still mesmerised by the constellation he was making with the sugar, determined not to show his feelings. She knew from Paddy and Tristan that he was unhappy at home and didn’t like his stepfather.
When the children and Walter came back into the kitchen, Tristan tried to assert his bravura by picking up a plate of leftovers and offering one to his father, which he declined. Then the three boys, unasked, set about clearing the table. It was their way of not wanting to be engaged in any grown-up conversations.
“They still have an essay to write,” their father said.
“Mine is finished, he-he,” Paddy said with a little show of rebellion in the way he bared his teeth.
“Would you like supper?” Nell said, trying to sound ladylike.
“No, thank you,” their father said, and then announced to them, not to her, that he must be off. He put a hand on each of their shoulders and she felt a gush of pity for him, pity for their vacated bedroom and pity for the fact that he was perpetually the villain.
“They would like to go to the cinema with you some Sunday,” she said, and caught sight of their little fists raised in mutiny.
“A boarding school would be more like it,” he said, and assured her that he was looking into it; then from the bag he was carrying he took out a parcel and placed it on the table.
“These are second-rate,” he said, and through the torn paper she guessed it was the presents they had given him for his birthday. One was an enamel mug with his name engraved on it and the other a canvas pencil case. They shrugged and tried to show indifference, but she knew that later on at night they would fret and perhaps wonder if they had been careless in their choices.
“Sometimes I could kill Dad,” Paddy said after their father had gone out. She thought for a moment, then she ran. This was too much. He had moved faster than she suspected and she caught up with him just as the car was moving away. She shouted, ran, then tapped furiously on the passenger seat, and to her surprise found a woman there, a woman a little older than herself, hair parted in the centre and draped carefully over either ear, like cloth earmuffs.
“Excuse me, excuse me,” she had to shout through the glass, and feared she could not be heard. The woman either could not or would not wind the window down, so he leaned across and very slowly opened it just a fraction, allowing Nell a sufficient aperture for her brow and eyes. It was like being muzzled.
“It’s awful, awful to return their presents,” she said.
“You call those presents,” he said humorously. She wanted to say worse things, such as that he was a thief, owed her half the value of the house, never lifted a finger to support them, and yet assumed this high moral stance, but instead she found herself mumbling her grievances, then turning away.
Jocularity reigned in the kitchen.
“Spiv,” Tristan said to Paddy.
“Toffee-nosed Etonian,” Paddy was saying back.
“Dressing for dinner, Watson?” Derwent asked as he tossed spoons in the air.
“Might do,” Paddy said and, turning to Tristan, said, “Fetch me my Garibaldi.”
“Fetch it yourself, slave,” Tristan said, and then seeing that she was close to tears he ran, clasped her hand, and in a much softer voice said, “Don’t worry, don’t worry.” Perhaps it was the sight of the other woman that had provoked those tears. It was not that she wanted him back, but seeing him with someone else meant he was more capable than she of retrieving the pieces of his life. Rita had already gone, her parents dismayed by the fact of her living alone with a man, so that one day her sister who nursed in Birmingham came and took her away. She wrote them cards but never once included any regards or mention of Nell.
Unprompted, the three of them took it upon themselves to proclaim against fathers. Both boys gloated over the endless wrongs their father had done to them, raking up old scores, his stinginess about pocket money, his umpteen house rules, having to make toast for him, while Derwent scoffed at such trifles and said, “You think dads are bad, you should try stepdads,” and taking the floor, he spoke with jubilance of his stepfather’s grumpiness, his drinking, his shouting, his gluttony, his socks, his know-it-all-ness, and the way he closed the bedroom door when he went in there with Derwent’s mother. With a snigger he recited from a valentine card that his stepfather had given his mother—“Seven years on, and still my queen!”
They made faces at the idiocy of this. Derwent’s father was a television critic who watched television incessantly, so that if anyone stirred, or if a voice was raised, his mother had a habit of saying, “Ssh, Daddy’s working.” Having demolished fathers, they then got on to sisters, drips, and of course the new baby. The new baby was going to be called Clarissa. The three of them burst into untoward laughter and said they wanted to give Clarissa a good punch, and in the middle of laughing, Derwent blurted out that he wished to be part of their family and not his own.
“Yeah! Yeah!” Paddy and Tristan said, jumping up and down with joy and asked her to show clemency for a boy who had to lay the table in his own house, who was never allowed to sit in his own sitting room, who had to help younger children, and who would probably have to burp the new baby.
“You can come as often as you like, love,” she had said to him.
“That’s not the same,” he said, his little features sharpening.
“But you have a family, Derwent,” she said.
“Yeah, but not like this, you guys love one another,” he said, and looked her straight in the face with a gaze that was at once accusing and full of misgiving. He had pale grey eyes and was not a comely child.
“Don’t be sad, you and me will go safariing later on,” Paddy said, and Tristan, feeling excluded from this new bond, sat on the floor and began to grouse, saying that he hated school and hated geography and was probably the unhappiest boy alive. Just then there was another tap on the door and they all jumped, believing it was their father who had returned.
It was Daisy on her weekly ritual visit, which Nell had quite forgotten. She was an older woman with thin snow-white hair and rubber galoshes from which the toes and heels had been cut. She loved coming and said that the two sherries she drank were her treat for the entire week. While she drank, the boys made fun of her behind her back, touched her thinning hair and the headscarf that had fallen onto her shoulders, while singing under their breaths, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.”
“I feel very spoilt,” Daisy said, then sipped the sherry and ate the macaroons with relish.
“Daisy, did you bring the you-know-what?” Tristan asked, egged on by Paddy. It was an old military uniform with medals that had belonged to her dead brother George, and which she had promised them. They believed so strongly in George that they conferred with him, asked him questions about the fields of Flanders, the thrill of battle, and so forth.
“Goodness me, I must search,” Daisy said, and put her glass daintily on the table for a refill, then changed the safety pin from one of her lisle stockings to another as a reminder not to forget. They sniggered at her thin milk-white thighs, the part that was not covered by the lisle.
“Daisy, you’re hopeless,” Tristan said while she patted his fringe and said what a beautiful boy he was. It was the moment of her visit she relished most, flushed a little from the first glass and about to enjoy the second, off on a canter about her days as a model with the “Euston Road Crowd,” recalling names of models and painters and hangers-on, blithe names like Dora and Bella; the names magically evoking the dash and vigour of those bohemian times as she wondered aloud where they all were and said to herself that one or two were certainly in Cornwall, yes, dotty old Cornwall.
“And who might you be, little chap?” she said, noticing Derwent for the first time.
“One of the family,” he said, proud of his newfound prestige.
“Very thin neck, he needs malt and cod-liver oil,” she said, and wondered aloud if it was time to go, though of course she would not say no to a third glass. It always happened: her hand just missed the edge of the table, and seeing the glass drop once again, she became flustered and exclaimed, “Oh bother, where have me eyes gone?” while Nell patted her shoulder and Tristan dutifully got the dustpan, muttering, “Here we go, here we go, same old story…”
The manuscript Nell was reading was set in the Swiss Alps. It was about a couple who wanted to adopt a baby but could never agree on the particular baby and therefore didn’t really want to. It slipped in and out of sincerity, so that she found herself making notes furiously on her pad, asking this putative mother to show both her yearning for a child and her hidden revulsion, which made her so ambivalent. When the telephone rang she did not hear it for a moment, then did and hesitated, fearing it was her husband with fresh rebuke.
“Yes,” she said somewhat hesitantly, and waited. At first there was nothing, then she could hear breathing followed by a succession of breaths, and not knowing what it signaled, she said in a high-pitched voice, “Who are you? What do you want?”
“Big cock,” the voice said, then vowed to come right over and fuck her, because he knew where she lived and there was no point in her calling the police as he was seconds away.
“I’m going to do you, beaut,” he said, and as she slung the receiver down, her elbow weighed on it as if she were holding down a writhing animal. As soon as she released the pressure it started to ring again, so she took it off the hook and put a shawl over it to keep herself from hearing the bleeps. Her whole being shook, but her mind became clear, purposeful, as she ran around the house to close the windows that had been flung open in the war games, bolted the front door, bolted the side door, and then switched lights on in the various rooms, calling at the top of her voice. Back in the kitchen she could not read but sat on the edge of the chair, alert.
“Who’s that … who’s that?” she said. It was Tristan, his face abashed, the cotton eiderdown bunched around him.
“Sweetheart,” she said as she went to pick him up. His pyjamas were open down the front and his skin red where he had been scratching himself.
“The Baddie dream,” she said, and he nodded. It happened again and again, and the only way for him to come out of it was to waken and to tell it to her word for word, except that the words came haltingly, and in between he cried or almost cried, even though he strove to be brave.
“I’m coming home from school … home to Pads and you, and the school is another school altogether, it’s on the moors and suddenly it gets misty, all misty … and I know I shouldn’t be on the moors and I start to run and I see a man coming and go up to him to ask him the way but he has no nose … and he has no eyes and no mouth either … a blank egg, so I run and I get to the coach and it’s just moving away and I jump onto it and tell the conductor, who has his back to me, about the nasty man that I saw on the moors, and he turns and he says, ‘Like mine.’ It’s the same man, it’s the same Baddie, and I’m trying to come home to you and Pads, but I can’t … my feet won’t carry me.
“Don’t tell Derwent,” he said, suddenly remembering that they had a visitor, and then, recollecting that he heard her shouting and going around the house with a stick, he asked if it was to do with Dad.
“It was only playacting,” she said, finding that with them, and on their account, she was fearless; her terrors got the better of her only when she was alone.
“Me mind Mama,” Tristan said, reverting to being very young, and holding him she could feel his fear by his breathing, feel the quick galvanic little spasms; his heart like a bird trying to escape the confines of his chest.
“Are we going to boarding school like Dad said?” he asked.
“Not yet, not yet,” she said evasively.
“When?”
“Not for a long time.”
“That long,” he challenged, and took his arms from around her neck and then drew his hands apart, putting great effort into it, the hands and arms going farther and farther back, emphasizing the distance, the never-to-be-filled distance until they were separated.
“Monkey,” she said.
“You promise,” he said, and tilted his face and cocked his ear for her to whisper assurances into. His ear was silken and the lobe squashed from where he had been lying on it.
“Meanies,” Paddy said as he crept in unbeknownst to them. He hated those night conversations when he found them together, whispering and cuddling.
“Tristan couldn’t sleep,” she said.
“Neither could I,” he said sourly. Rage and mistrust welled up in him. It was as if they had deliberately done it, to exclude him.
“I’m certainly in favour of boarding school,” he said, letting it be known that he had been listening outside the door.
“We’re not going to be apart,” she said, and put her arms out, and though he did not want to weaken, he fell into her embrace, his nose repeatedly scratching itself on the sleeve of her dress, and now it was as if three hearts were thumping together. Half in anger and half in play they decided to box one another, and she had to remind them of her mother’s phrase of being “good little chaps,” knowing that the phrase as always would amuse them, bring back the summers, the biscuits, the glasses of homemade lemonade, and the night that Dixie came up to the bedroom and left her card under the bed.
“Will we go in the summer?” Paddy asked.
“Maybe,” she said, and for the second time that night she carted them up the stairs to bed.