Losing Nicola Read online

  ‘They’re trying to make us more normal,’ explained Orlando once, as we sat unwillingly at the circus. ‘They don’t want us to grow up as misfits.’

  ‘Too late, don’t you think?’

  ‘Far, far too late.’ Musical Orlando groaned as a clown with tufts of ginger hair sticking out on either side of his chalk-white big-lipped mask did something unfunny with a string of sausages. ‘Why can’t they take us to the Messiah, or the Christmas Oratorio or something?’

  ‘Trouble is, we’re all too well brought up to tell them how much we hate it,’ I said. ‘Especially Widow Twankey.’

  ‘Especially the bloody clowns.’ His hand shook slightly; there was sweat on his forehead. ‘There must be a word for hating clowns, some phobia or other. Whatever it is, I’ve got it.’ He grinned his bone-white grin. ‘My idea of heaven is never again having to watch Lulubelle and her Flying Ponies shedding sequins like dandruff all over the circus ring.’

  Pantomimes and circuses apart, nobody offered us entertainment; we made our own from such pinchbeck as was available. We were always busy. Those long hours of childhood didn’t exist for us. We made lists of musicians beginning with B, we read the encyclopaedia, we collected things such as stamps, pressed flowers, sea-glass, stones, quotations, favourite poems. We made constantly revised lists of the books we would take with us to a desert island. Orlando and I were occasionally invited into Aunt’s room to have tea with her and listen to her tales of life in Africa, or narrow escapes she had had from naked spear-throwers or rampaging elephants.

  In that bleakish seaside town, the one thing there was in abundance was stones. We collected flat stones for skimming, stones with a hole through the middle, stones that looked like amber when they were wet, almost translucent. Green stones, stones with multicoloured seams and striations running through them. There were very few shells on that shingle beach, a few broken winkles, half a mussel, shining like a curve of blue pearl in the shingle, the occasional cuttlefish cast up by the tide and embedded in fierce black clumps of sea-wrack.

  Orlando and I were luckier than most. We had a wind-up gramophone, a pre-war instrument that had belonged to my mother. We loved folding back the jointed chrome arm and fitting in the sharp metal needle, which we bought in tiny rattling boxes of painted tin. We owned half a dozen records: In the Mood, and Jealousy, the drinking song from The Student Prince, Max Bygraves singing Ghost Riders in the Sky. Henry Hall warbled The Teddy Bear’s Picnic, with Goodnight Sweetheart on the reverse side. We played these songs endlessly, over and over again, until one dramatic afternoon, my mother rushed in like a whirlwind and hurled whatever was on the turntable to the ground, where it smashed into several shiny black shards. To our surprise, we saw that she was crying. ‘For God’s sake!’ she shouted.

  Our homes were full of hidden tensions.

  TWO

  Our perpetually anxious mothers were not much involved with us. Although they fed us, saw that we got up in the morning, brushed our teeth regularly, took baths from time to time, they did not talk to us. We were always conscious of things unspoken, of the ordinary textures of our lives constantly on the verge of being brutally and incomprehensibly ripped apart. We knew, without knowing, that our existences were barely held together by the fragile stitches of the not-in-front-of-the-children caution that our mothers exercised. Life was frail, and we were aware of it.

  Sex had not sneaked into our consciousness, or if it had, was still unrecognized. There was no television to make us aware before our time, and although we were occasionally permitted to go to the cinema, we groaned when the hero kissed the heroine, or looked away, embarrassed. We weren’t allowed to read comics or Enid Blyton. Sweets were still rationed, strawberries were only available in season. Appearances mattered.

  We wore shorts and faded Aertex shirts. On our feet were Clark’s sandals or white tennis shoes, which we Blancoed vigorously when they grew grubby, setting them out on a window sill overnight to dry to a stiff chalky white. We never wore black plimsolls; black ones were common. Fish and chips were also common, and so was eating in the street. The pleasure and delight of buying three penn’orth of chips and devouring them, hot and vinegary, straight from the newspaper wrapping, was made all the more delicious by the guilty fear that one of our mothers might catch us.

  It was always our mothers we worried about. Fathers were rare or non-existent. We never asked about them, partly because in those years following the war, fathers were not a species to which we were used, and partly because we were somehow aware that the answer might be too painful to give or receive. I had a father, though I scarcely knew him and only saw him occasionally. David, Jeremy and the Tavistock brothers, did not. Their fathers had been war heroes, had Gone Down In Flames, according to Ava, or been prisoners-of-war in some German camp and never come home. Mine had spent the war working for intelligence in London, and then, in the immediate post-war years, in Germany, helping, so my mother said, to rebuild it, before returning to his position at an Oxford college. Whenever I thought of him back then, which was seldom, I envisaged my scholarly father in his shirtsleeves, setting bricks into mortar.

  Many of the middle-class mothers in the town took in Paying Guests, or PGs. Anything to have a man around the house again, whiskers in the bathroom basin, a smell of tobacco, bass tones instead of trebling pipes or the hoarse croaks of breaking voices. They had not been raised to deal with lodgers, but, finding themselves husbandless, they hoped that the extra income would help to pay for heating their large cold houses, and feeding their families. For such women, life after the war was a series of improvisations as they learned to cope in a new world that was essentially alien. Gardeners, cooks, nursery-maids and housemaids had vanished or else were simply unaffordable.

  For the most part, the PGs were misfits thrown up by the chaos of war, men who for reasons of health or age or incapacity, had not fought for King and Country, women whose husbands or fiancés had not returned from the front, or simply people, like Ava, who had quietly seized the opportunity to shuck off their former lives and start again in some quiet place where their pasts could not catch up with them.

  During our first years at Glenfield House, PGs passed through in a more or less continuous stream. Most were dull, some were more memorable. Among them was Attila the Nun, a pretty woman who, according to Ava, had Leapt Over the Wall, a mad journalist from Sófia, known to all as the Bulgarian Atrocity, and a tall Army officer called Major John Silver, who came complete with an eye patch and a war wound to the right leg.

  Sundry others swam briefly into our horizons and swam away again without making much of a ripple. Fiona found these people in the street, on trains, in queues, occasionally by answering ads requesting accommodation. She had a misleadingly open and sympathetic air so that people, particularly lame ducks, fell naturally into conversation with her, only to find themselves, often without understanding how, not only moving into her house, but also paying rent for the privilege of sharing the discomforts of our daily lives.

  Three of them stayed long enough to become fixtures.

  Prunella Vane met Fiona on the train, when she came down from London to interview for a job as a domestic science teacher at the grammar school. She was a buxom woman, like all the women in my recollection of childhood, except for someone called Mrs Simpson who, according to Ava, had got her claws into our Rightful King and whose real name was Mud.

  Despite her size, Miss Vane was of a nervous disposition and shied like a horse at loud noises and sudden shouts. She occupied a vast freezing attic bedroom on the third floor, from which you could look through dormer windows at the sea and the wrecked pier and glimpse the distant coast of France on summer evenings.

  ‘No need for curtains, as you see,’ my mother said briskly, showing her around the first time, while Orlando and I trailed behind, hoping to catch a glimpse of what lay inside Prunella’s canvas bag.

  ‘I’m not sure I’d feel quite comfortable . . .’ Miss Vane’s hand car
essed her throat.

  ‘No Peeping Toms up here, you can be sure of that,’ my mother said.

  ‘What about Peeping Dicks and Harrys?’ asked Orlando, at which Miss Vane stepped over to the window and twisted her long neck this way and that, as though to ascertain for herself that no rude man could make his stealthy way across the roof tiles and peer in at her chaste disrobings.

  ‘He’d have to be really determined . . .’ said my mother lightly, glaring at Orlando.

  ‘Unless he was a mountaineer.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear. Why on earth would a mountaineer want to waste his time spying on Miss Vane?’ She looked quickly at her potential new lodger. ‘Not that I’m . . . Of course I don’t mean . . . I’m sure that . . .’ The sentence trailed away, leaving behind a possible Miss Vane who wore flimsy undies and posed provocatively in the window, delighting binoculared passers-by on the promenade or even sailors out at sea, provided they had access to a telescope.

  Sensing a growing reluctance on the part of Miss Vane to seize this unique opportunity, Fiona smiled at Prunella. ‘If you really feel you want to block out the view, then of course we can find curtains for the window, Miss Vane. I’m sure I have something by me.’

  ‘Well, I’m really not certain whether I’ll be staying,’ Prunella said feebly, but we all knew that it was already too late. Like so many before her, she was caught in my mother’s gummed web. Anyway, by this time, she’d been offered, and had accepted, the teaching job she’d come down to the coast for, and perhaps in the end it simply seemed easier to stay than to look for alternative accommodation.

  Some time later, Ava tsked sardonically. ‘Domestic Science teacher? Jam tarts, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s all she’s good for.’

  ‘She does seem to have somewhat exaggerated her cooking abilities,’ Fiona said. ‘I must say I’d rather hoped she would see her way to mucking in and producing dinner for us occasionally.’

  ‘Why should she?’ asked Orlando. ‘I bet you lured her here with false promises of home-cooked meals and all mod cons.’

  ‘And that’s exactly what she’s got.’

  ‘You didn’t say she’d have to prepare the home-cooked meals herself. And she is paying rent, after all.’

  ‘I suppose I hoped that from natural goodness of heart, she might feel . . . Oh well . . .’ Fiona’s life was full of these plangent Oh wells . . .

  ‘As for home comforts, she asked me to scrape the ice off her window this morning,’ said Orlando.

  ‘Given her circumstances, she should be grateful for a roof over her head, at a rent she can afford,’ said Fiona coldly.

  ‘What exactly are her circumstances?’

  ‘That’s her business, not ours.’

  ‘Then how do you know she ought to be grateful?’

  ‘Unlucky in love, you mark my words,’ sniffed Ava.

  Gordon Parker was another long-term lodger, a round-shouldered nervous young man who worked in the public library. He had bad teeth and a high-pitched voice, thinning hair greased back across a lumpy sort of skull and spectacles, which, in Ava’s view, did him no favours. He was a member of a local choir, and behind the closed door of his room, we often heard him practising bits of Handel and Haydn in a reedy tenor.

  He wore the same clothes every day, winter and summer alike: a V-necked Fair Isle sweater over a checked shirt, a shabby beige corduroy jacket, and chukka boots. There was something nakedly sad about Gordon, which brought out whatever rudimentary maternal instinct Fiona possessed. He was the only lodger she invited in to have a cup of tea with the family; the rest were confined to an electric kettle in their bedrooms. Occasionally she would even send me up to his room with a couple of lumpy iced fairy cakes, the only thing she had ever learned to bake.

  My brothers teased him unmercifully, referring to him as Gordon the Barbarian or singing in a high falsetto under his window, until Fiona gave them a lecture on being kind to people who were weaker than they were.

  ‘What exactly did you do in the war, Gordon?’ they would ask innocently, blinking the bright blue eyes they had inherited from my father, when it was painfully obvious that the poor man would have registered D4 on any physical scale you cared to use. And Gordon would retort defiantly, flushing a fiery red, that he’d Done His Bit, thank you.

  ‘But what was your bit, Gordon? What did you do?’

  ‘Not that it’s any of your business, but I was employed as a factory worker.’

  ‘Doing what exactly?’

  ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’ And he would retire to his room to practise his Handel again.

  ‘He’s Not As Other Men,’ Ava told Orlando and me once, making sure the door was closed and my mother couldn’t hear her.

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘You know . . .’ She put a finger to the side of her nose and tapped it.

  ‘No, we don’t,’ I said.

  ‘You’re being very mysterious, Ava.’

  ‘The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.’ Ava pursed her lips. ‘That’s as far as I’m prepared to go.’

  ‘Well, it’s not very far,’ complained Orlando. ‘I suppose it’s another of the things we’ll find out when we’re older.’

  ‘Exactly right.’

  Our third long-term Paying Guest was Bertram Yelland, art teacher at one of the many boys’ preparatory schools in the area. A chronically splenetic man in his early thirties, he was much given to reading pieces aloud from the newspaper and ranting about the state of the country.

  ‘Festival of bloody Britain,’ he would say disgustedly in the accents of the minor aristocracy from which he sprang. ‘Designed to celebrate what, exactly? The beastly Hun being handed everything on a plate?’ He’d spread a slice of toast with Ava’s home-made marmalade and attack it fiercely with a set of strong yellow teeth. ‘We were supposed to be the bloody winners, weren’t we? And look at us now. Christ, you’d hardly know the war was over. Conditions are a bloody sight worse now than they were during the actual conflict.’

  He repeated this kind of thing over and over again. Once, Ava challenged him. ‘We’re struggling to Get Out of the Doldrums,’ she said.

  ‘Doldrums is the word,’ snorted Bertram. ‘The whole bloody country’s weighted down by gloom. It’s enough to make you join up again. At least you had regular meals in the army, and I don’t mean pigswill either. Christ, what was that muck Mrs B served up this evening?’

  ‘A delicious Shepherd’s Pie,’ said Ava loyally.

  ‘Made from what exactly, Mrs Carlton?’

  ‘Nice minced lamb, of course.’

  ‘Minced shepherd would be nearer the mark.’ He groaned. ‘The average sheepherder would run for the hills sooner than eat garbage like that.’

  ‘We all have to make sacrifices, Mr Yelland.’

  ‘Let’s face it, the woman’s a hopeless cook, even if she has a damned fine intelligence.’

  ‘You do realize that we’ve recently come through a Punishing War, don’t you?’ said Ava, who was turning the collar on one of Bella’s blouses. ‘Cooking for such large numbers isn’t easy. And don’t forget some things are still on ration.’

  ‘Realize? I should bloody say I do. What do you think I’ve been doing for the past five years, sitting about on my arse like that poncy little librarian upstairs?’

  ‘That’s quite enough of that sort of talk.’

  ‘Making a land fit for heroes, that’s what I was doing.’ Bertram burped loudly. ‘Well, whatever Mrs B’s inadequacies – and Christ knows there’s a number of them – she’s at least what my grandmother would call A Lady. In fact, she’d out-Lady my sainted grandmama any day of the week.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear you say so.’

  Bertram chuckled grimly. ‘Woman’s got a way with an eyebrow that could shrivel the balls faster than a snowstorm. And when she stares at you with that don’t-fuck-with-me look in her eyes, you’d damn well better watch out.’

&nbs
p; ‘I’ll thank you to remember there are children in the room, Mr Yelland.’

  But Ava, a fearful snob, didn’t really mind Bertram’s bad language. She knew that his father was a Sir and his mother the second daughter of an Earl.

  ‘Do you enjoy your job, Mr Yelland?’ she asked once.

  ‘Hate the bloody place. Hate the little blighters I’m supposed to teach, hate the other so-called teachers. If I wasn’t dead broke . . .’

  ‘Can’t your father help?’ asked Ava delicately.

  ‘Help? That’s a laugh,’ said Bertram. ‘He never stops sending me letters telling me to forget my highfalutin notions of being a painter, it’s high time I got something behind me, whatever that might mean.’ He threw himself around in his chair. ‘God, it’s like some third-rate cheap romance, kicking me out of the house if I don’t toe the line, no son of mine, never darken my door again, cut you off without a shilling, all that hackneyed rubbish that fathers like Sir Chesney throw at sons like me.’

  ‘Really?’ Ava was thrilled at these behind-the-scenes glimpses of life in the houses of the nobility.

  ‘But I’ll make it one day, Mrs Carlton, I can promise you that. I only need a single breakthrough, and then it’s fame and fortune for Bertram Yelland, and be damned to the pater.’

  We children didn’t like Mr Yelland, who had a nasty habit of using a wet towel to switch the backs of our bare summer legs if he found us in the passage when he emerged from the bathroom.

  ‘Trying to look through the keyhole, are you?’ he’d roar, and with one smooth movement, off would come his black leather belt.

  ‘Why? Is there anything to see?’ Orlando asked him, nimbly dodging. ‘Are we missing something?’

  ‘None of your damned impudence, boy! I’ve got your measure, all right. If I catch you hanging about here again, you’re for the chop.’