Human Croquet Kate Atkinson

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Isobel was sure someone had just called her name, the echo seemed to linger invisibly in the grey light and she pinched Charles’ ear to wake him up. Someone was shouting their names, the voice sounded far away and hoarse. Charles stood upright and rammed his cap on his head. ‘It’s Daddy,’ he said. Charles looked careworn, as if on the inside he’d aged several decades since yesterday. The voice drew closer, close enough for them to follow the direction from which it was coming. And then, suddenly, as if he’d just stepped out from a tree that he’d been hiding behind all along – there he was, there was Gordon.

He dropped to his knees, his body collapsing with relief, and Isobel stumbled into his arms and burst into tears, but Charles held back, looking on with empty eyes as if he suspected Gordon might be just another woodland mirage. An appearing trick.

‘Come on, old chap,’ Gordon coaxed softly and held out a hand towards Charles until finally Charles fell against the paternal gabardine breast and started to sob – deep, ugly sobs that racked his small body. Gordon laid his cheek against Isobel’s curls, so that they formed another wretchedly sentimental tableau (‘Where have you been, Daddy dearest?’ perhaps). Gordon stared at a tree in front of him as if what he was seeing wasn’t a tree but a gibbet.

‘Time to go,’ Gordon said eventually, reluctantly. Charles sniffed hard and wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘We have to help Mummy,’ he said, the urgency of his message punctuated by woebegone hiccups.

Gordon hoisted Isobel up and carried her high on his chest, the other hand holding on to Charles. ‘Mummy’s all right,’ he said and before Charles could protest they were brought up short at the sight of Vinny – Vinny whom both of them had completely forgotten about since she’d gone to do you-know-what. She was sitting on a moss-covered tree-stump with her head in her hands. She looked dark and gnarled like some ancient forest-dwelling creature. But when she stood up, with no word of greeting for Charles or Isobel, they could see that she was the same old Vinny and not some mythic creature. ‘There you are,’ Gordon said, as if he’d just encountered her in the back garden and – apparently sharing the same delusion – she replied, ‘You took your time.’ Her thick brown stockings were laddered and she had a scratch on her nose. Perhaps she’d been clawed by a wild animal.

The familiarity of the insides of the black car made them weak with happiness. They inhaled the seat-leather drug, Isobel thought she might die of hunger any minute, thought she might eat the seat-leather, perhaps Charles was thinking the same thing as he ran his hands over the leather of the back seat as if it was still attached to an animal. Their feet dangled above the floor of the car, their socks filthy, their legs latticed by scratches. ‘Mummy,’ Charles reminded Gordon, who gave him a stiff smile of reassurance in the rear-view mirror. ‘Mummy’s fine,’ he said, pressing his foot down on the accelerator.

They didn’t see how she could be fine, she didn’t look fine the last time they saw her. Where was she now? ‘Where is Mummy?’ Charles asked plaintively. Gordon’s eyelid tremored slightly and he stuck his indicator out and took a sudden right turn instead of answering. ‘Hospital,’ he said, after they’d been driving down this new road for a while. ‘She’s in hospital, they’re going to make her better.’

Vinny, who was collapsed in the passenger seat, looking as if she needed a blood transfusion, came to life for a moment and said, rather groggily, ‘Don’t worry about her,’ and gave a grim little laugh. ‘At last, I get to sit in the front,’ she added with a sigh and closed her eyes.

Charles took Eliza’s shoe out of his pocket where it had been since last night and handed it silently to Gordon who dropped it and nearly lost control of the car. Vinny woke up, snatched the shoe and stuffed it in her bag. By now, the heel was hanging off like a tooth about to drop out.

‘Are we going home?’ Charles asked after a while.

‘Home?’ Gordon repeated doubtfully as if this was the last place he was thinking of going. He glanced at Vinny, as if to glean her opinion, but she’d dropped off to sleep and was snoring with relief, so with a heartfelt sigh, Gordon said, ‘Yes, we have to go home.’

Back in Arden the Widow made them porridge and bacon and eggs before putting them to bed. ‘The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast,’ Gordon said, staring gloomily at his bacon and eggs. He cut his bacon up into small pieces and stared at it for a long time before placing a piece in his mouth as if it was a delicate thing that he might damage if he chewed it too hard. After a considerable effort he managed to swallow a piece and then put his knife and fork down as though he would never eat again. Vinny had no such problems and ate her way through breakfast as if a night in the woods was just the thing for giving an edge to your appetite.

The Widow woke them from their dreamless morning’s sleep with lunch in bed as if they were invalids. They ate ham sandwiches, the last tomatoes from the greenhouse and lemon Madeira cake and fell asleep again and didn’t see the Widow come in and clear away their trays.

At tea-time she roused them again, and they came downstairs for boiled eggs and soldiers of toast followed by leftover apple-pie. Perhaps this would be their lives from now on – eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping – it was certainly the kind of regime the Widow would approve of for children.

Gordon, Vinny and the Widow sat at the tea-table with them but ate nothing, though the Widow poured endless cups of tea – the colour of young copper-beech leaves – from the big chrome pot with its green and yellow knitted cosy. Their eggs waited for them in matching green-and-yellow jackets as if they’d just hatched from the teapot. Vinny sipped her tea daintily, her little finger crooked. The Widow observed Charles and Isobel very carefully, everything they did seemed to be of the greatest interest to her.

Charles took the cosy off his egg and hit its rounded skull gently with his teaspoon until it was crazed all over like old china. Gordon, watching intently, made a funny noise, as though his lungs were being squeezed and the Widow said, ‘Stop doing that!’ to Charles and leant over and sliced the top off his egg for him. She did the same to Isobel’s egg and commanded, ‘Eat!’ and, obediently, Isobel poked a finger of toast into the orange-eyed egg.

The silence, for once, was astonishing – no head-nipping from Vinny, no lofty pronouncements from the Widow. Only Charles chewing his toast and the funny gulping noise Vinny made when she swallowed her tea. Gordon stared at the tablecloth, lost in some dark dungeon of thought. He looked up occasionally at the thick cotton nets at the bay window as though he was waiting for somebody to step from behind them. Eliza perhaps. But no – Eliza was in hospital, the Widow confirmed. Vinny’s tongue flickered like a snake whenever Eliza’s name was mentioned. Neither Gordon nor Vinny nor the Widow wanted to talk about Eliza. It seemed that nobody wanted to talk about anything.

But what had happened? Everything that had seemed so clear yesterday – the wood, the fear, the abandonment – today seemed elusive, as if the fog that enveloped them last night was still invisibly present. Charles was clinging to the one thing they were sure of – absence of Eliza. ‘When can we see Mummy?’ he asked insistently, his voice reedy with misery. ‘Soon,’ the Widow said, ‘I expect.’ Gordon put his hands over his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to look at the tablecloth any more.

As if to help him, Vinny cleared away the dishes on a big wooden tray. Vera had been given ‘a couple of days off’ the Widow said and Vinny whined, ‘Well, I hope you don’t think I’m going to take her place,’ and just to show what a bad servant she would make she managed to drop the entire tray of china before she got to the door. Gordon didn’t even look up.

Before they went to bed for the third and last time that day, they came downstairs in their pyjamas to say good-night. The Widow gave them milk and digestive biscuits to take upstairs and in exchange they gave goodnight kisses – depositing little bird-pecks on the cheeks of Vinny and the Widow, neither of whom could handle anything more affectionate. The Widow smelt of lavender water, Vinny of coal-tar soap and cabbage. Gordon hugged them one at a time, tight, too tight, so that they wanted to struggle, but didn’t. He whispered, ‘You’ll never know how much I love you,’ his moustache tickling their ears.

* * *

For a moment Isobel thought she was back in Boscrambe Woods. But then she realized that she’d woken up in her own bed and that the maniac making enormous gestures, like a mad mute, in the semi-darkness was in fact Charles, trying to get her to follow him down to the first-floor landing.

A wand of light beamed through the gap in the curtains and they could hear the familiar prut-prut-prut of the black car’s engine. They watched the scene down below from behind the curtains. Gordon (gabardine collar up and hat-brim down – like a villain) was standing by the open door of the car, saying something to the Widow that made her give out a little cry and hang on to his lapels, so that Vinny had to prise her off him. Then Gordon got in the car and slammed the door and without looking back drove away from Hawthorn Close.

The same fat lantern moon that had guided them in the wood only twenty-four hours ago, was hung now in the blackness over the streets of trees. At the top of Chestnut Avenue they could see the car pause as if it was deciding whether to go left up Holly Tree Lane or right along Sycamore Street. Then the black car made up its mind and turned left on to the road north, its rear lights disappearing suddenly into the night.

At breakfast next morning, Vinny was still there, cutting big doorsteps of bread and jam and saying, ‘I’m going to come and live here for a while and help to look after you.’ She waited for them to say something in response to this news but they said nothing because the Widow was always telling them, ‘If you can’t think of anything nice to say don’t say anything at all.’

‘Your daddy’s had to go away on business,’ Vinny continued, looking at them in turn, first one, then the other as if she was checking for signs of disbelief on their faces.

The Widow came into the dining-room and sat down at the breakfast-table. ‘Your daddy’s had to go away,’ she announced hoarsely and started to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief which was monogrammed extravagantly (not with ‘W’ for Widow, but ‘C’ for Charlotte) and which suddenly reminded Isobel of something. She nearly fell off her chair in the hurry to scramble down from the table. She ran into the hallway, pushing a chair next to the hallstand so that she could reach the pegs, clambered up on to it and slipped her hand into the pocket of the plaid wool coat that had been hanging there ever since they came back from the wood, yesterday morning.

Eliza’s handkerchief was still there, neatly folded in its white sandwich-triangle, still emblazoned with its initial, still bearing the traces of Eliza’s perfume – tobacco and Arpege – and something darker, like rotting flower petals and leafmould. By the time Vinny hauled her down from the chair she was hysterical and pulled out a clump of Vinny’s hair in the effort to escape her bony clutches. Vinny screamed (the sound of rusty hinges and coffin lids) and gave Isobel a sharp slap on the back of the knee.

‘Lavinia!’ the Widow rebuked sternly from the dining-room door and Vinny jumped at the tone of the Widow’s voice. ‘Remember what’s just happened,’ the Widow hissed in her unlovely daughter’s ear. Vinny did an approximation of flouncing and muttered, ‘She’s better off without her anyway.’ In the tussle Vinny managed to wrestle the handkerchief out of Isobel’s hand and the Widow bent down and picked up the lace-edged, monogrammed trophy and swiftly tucked it into the stern bosom of her blouse.

In the days after Gordon drove into the night the Widow and Vinny were as nervous as cats. Every car engine, every footstep seemed to put them on the alert. They scoured the newspapers every day as if there might be secret messages hidden in the text. ‘I’m a bag of nerves,’ the Widow said, jumping and clutching her heart as Vera muttered her way into the dining-room with a tureen of soup.

The Widow tried to be nice to them, but the strain began to show after a while. ‘You’re such naughty children,’ she sighed in exasperation. ‘That’s what happens to naughty children,’ the Widow said, as she locked them in their attic bedroom in the middle of a Sunday afternoon as punishment for some transgression they’d committed. They didn’t care, they didn’t mind being locked up together. They almost liked it.

They were waiting for Gordon and Eliza to come back. They were waiting for the prut-prut-prut of the black car. They were waiting for Eliza to come home from the hospital. For Gordon to come back from his business trip. Their outer lives continued much as before – waking, eating, sleeping, starting school again after the half-term holiday – but they could have been robots for all this meant to them. Real time, the time they kept inside their heads, stopped while they waited for Eliza to come home.

Their sense of time grew distorted. The days crawled by at an unbearably slow pace, even going to school didn’t seem to make much difference to the great stretches of empty time that yawned ahead of them. Mr Baxter allowed Isobel to start school early, ‘to get her off your hands’. Mrs Baxter offered to walk them to school in the mornings and look after them until the Widow and Vinny came home at night. Mrs Baxter fed them milk and cake in her big warm kitchen, Charles pretending to be another little boy altogether in case Mr Baxter walked in.

Vinny, cross to begin with, was so much crosser at the turn that events had taken that she behaved as if she’d quite like to lock them up permanently. So she said anyway. Vinny’s face had turned into an old crab-apple and the Widow had to keep her busy at the back of the shop, away from the customers, in case she curdled the cream or made the cheese grow mould. ‘It’s the change of life,’ the Widow explained sotto voce to Mrs Tyndale over the broken biscuits (although not so sotto that Vinny couldn’t hear).

It was the change of life for all of them, but it couldn’t last, surely? Sooner or later Eliza would come out of hospital, Gordon would return from his business trip and everything would return to normal. Neither Charles nor Isobel ever thought for a moment that Gordon and Eliza had left them permanently in the clutches of Vinny and the Widow. The memory of a broken Eliza under a tree, her eggshell skull bashed and dented, her white throat, stretched (like time) beyond endurance, was something that they refused to think about. The Widow said that Eliza was getting better in hospital. ‘Why can’t we go and see her then?’ Charles frowned.

‘Soon, soon,’ the Widow replied, her old milky-blue eyes clouding over.

Life without Gordon was marginally more boring, but without Eliza it was meaningless. She was everything – their safety (even when she was angry), their entertainment (even when she was bored), their bread and meat and milk. They carried her around like an ache inside, somewhere in the regions of the heart. ‘Perhaps Mummy’s not allowed to talk,’ Charles speculated as they played Snakes and Ladders in their attic prison one gloomy Saturday. The cause of their imprisonment was unsure but might have had something to do with the large scratch on the Widow’s dining-table and its relation to the penknife in Charles’ pocket. ‘Perhaps it’s bad for her throat or something,’ he pursued. Isobel was caught up in the coils of a particularly long snake and didn’t notice that Charles had started to cry until it was brought to her attention by a big crystal tear – almost as big as the pear-drops on the Widow’s chandelier – splashing on the board between them.

They were used to each other crying, their waiting was seasoned and watered with tears. (‘One or other of you always has the waterworks turned on,’ Vinny chided raggedly one morning as Charles started hyperventilating on the way to school and had to be thumped hard by Vinny between the shoulder blades – a remedy on the kill rather than cure side of things.) ‘Cheer up,’ Isobel urged him now – but in such a melancholic tone that it only made him worse. She passed him the dice-shaker but it was a long time before either of them could make another move.

They were sitting by the fire, listening to Children’s Hour, Vinny (in the armchair she’d claimed as hers) darning her thick stockings. Vinny was not a needlewoman – the darn she was labouring over looked like a piece of wattle fencing – and the Widow tut-tutted loudly at Vinny’s botched handicraft.

Vera clattered in the background, setting the table in the dining-room. The Widow looked at Vinny and Vinny put her darning down. Then the Widow took a deep breath and leant over and turned the radio off. They looked at her expectantly. ‘Children,’ she said gravely, ‘I’m afraid I have some very sad news for you. Your mummy isn’t coming home. She’s gone away.’

‘Gone away? Where?’ Charles shouted, leaping to his feet and adopting an aggressive, pugilistic stance.

‘Calm down, Charles,’ the Widow said. ‘She was never what you’d call very reliable.’ Unreliable? This hardly seemed an adequate explanation of Eliza’s disappearance. ‘I don’t believe you, you’re lying!’ Charles yelled at her. ‘She wouldn’t leave us!’

‘Well, she has, I’m afraid, Charles,’ the Widow said dispassionately. Was she telling the truth? It didn’t feel like it, but how could they tell when they were so helpless? The Widow signalled to Vera in the doorway and said, ‘Come along now, dry those tears, Isobel – there’s a nice cottage pie for tea. And a raspberry shape for pudding, Charles, you know how you like that,’ and Charles looked at her with incredulous eyes. Could she possibly believe that a pink blancmange, no sooner seen than eaten, could possibly compensate for the loss of a mother?

It was already nearly two months since Gordon had driven away into the night with only the moon for company. One morning, the Widow received a letter in the post – a flimsy blue bit of paper with foreign stamps. She opened it and as she read it her eyes filled with tears. ‘Well, it’s not as if he’s dead,’ Vinny muttered crossly to the teapot. ‘Who?’ Charles asked eagerly. ‘Nobody you know!’ Vinny snapped.

Before bedtime that same night, the Widow said she had some sad news to tell them. Charles’ face was a picture of misery, ‘Daddy’s not left us as well?’ he whispered to the Widow, who nodded sadly and said, ‘Yes, I’m afraid so, Charles.’

‘He’ll come back,’ Charles resisted stoutly. ‘Daddy’s going to come back.’

Vinny dipped a Rich Tea biscuit into her tea and nibbled it like a large rodent. The Widow’s old liverspotted hand trembled and her cup rattled on its saucer as she said, ‘Daddy can’t come back, Charles.’

‘Why not?’ Charles knocked his cup of cocoa over in his agitation. ‘Cloth, Vinny,’ the Widow said in a tone that suggested she was warning Vinny about the cloth rather than asking her to go and get one. They could hear Vinny saying, ‘Clothvinnyclothvinny,’ once she got into the hallway.

The Widow gathered herself together again. ‘He can’t come back because he’s in heaven.’

‘Heaven?’ they both repeated in unison. The Widow forced them to Sunday School every week so they knew about ‘Heaven’ – it was blue and contained a lot of clouds and angels, but no-one in a trilby and a gabardine mac.

‘Is he an angel?’ Charles asked, puzzled.

‘Yes,’ the Widow said, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘Daddy’s an angel now, looking after you from heaven.’

‘He’s not dead, is he?’ Charles said bluntly and the Widow grew even paler, if that was possible, and said, ‘Well, not dead exactly …’ and put her hands over her face so they couldn’t see it and sat like that for a long time saying nothing until they grew very uncomfortable and tip-toed out of the room and up the stairs. They went to bed not much the wiser, more confused, in fact, than before she imparted her ‘sad news’ to them.

It was ever-helpful Vinny who clarified the situation for them next morning at breakfast. The Widow was still in her room and Vera had slammed the big chrome teapot down and gone off to burn toast. Charles and Isobel were spooning in their porridge, keeping quiet because Vinny was never at her best in the morning. She lit up a cigarette and said, ‘I hope you two don’t think that things are going to be the same as they were before.’ They greeted this remark with the silence it deserved. They were only too woefully aware that things were not as they were before.

‘You’re going to have to behave very well now that your daddy’s dead.’

‘Dead?’ Charles repeated in horror. ‘Dead?’ And he turned as white as the Widow’s suet pastry, as white as the Widow, and ran from the table. Later, he had to be dragged with some force from the understairs cupboard where he could be heard howling like a wolf-cub.

Gordon had died of a bronchial infection, in a London fog. ‘Lots of people died,’ Vinny said, as if that made it better. ‘A real pea-souper,’ she added, sounding quite proud of Gordon, for once. ‘He was an asthmatic,’ the Widow could be heard telling everyone, ‘ever since he was a little boy,’ and they could hear the murmurs of surprise and dismay from their sentry-post on the stairs. They had no idea what an asthmatic was, but it sounded serious.

There was a photograph of Gordon in an ornate silver frame on the sideboard. They’d never really noticed it while they had the real thing in front of them, but now it assumed a totemic kind of significance – how could Gordon be so visible and tangible (if only in two dimensions) – and yet be so beyond their reach? War-handsome in his RAF uniform, cap tilted rakishly, he was like a dashing stranger that they regretted not having paid more attention to.

Isobel lay in bed at night, imagining him walking off into a wall of white fog, fog like cotton wool wrapping his body, cotton-wool-fog filling his lungs and choking him. Sometimes in dreams he walked back out from the fog wall, walked towards her, lifting her up and tossing her towards the sky, but when she floated back down to earth Gordon had disappeared and she was alone in the middle of a vast dark wilderness of trees.

Where was Gordon buried? The Widow looked startled when they asked her. ‘Buried?’ She cranked up the gears in her brain, her eyes were full of little cog wheels – ‘Down south, in London, where he died.’

‘Why?’ Charles persisted.

‘Why what?’ she responded tetchily.

‘Why was he buried down there? Why didn’t you bring him home?’ But the Widow didn’t seem to know the answer to this question.

Of Eliza, nothing remained. Except her children, of course. Charles asked to see photographs of her and the Widow said there weren’t any, which seemed strange considering how many times Gordon had produced his old Kodak camera and said, ‘Say cheese now, everybody!’ Alarmingly, the picture they carried of her in their heads was beginning to fade a little more each day, like a photograph undeveloping, time unravelling – like the jumpers that Vinny laddered down to knit up afresh as something equally horrible. Perhaps Eliza would appear in a few years’ time, knitted up as a quite new mother. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Isobel,’ the Widow said, her patience with them almost all used up. ‘Maybe it’s because you’re such naughty children that she left you,’ Vinny remarked one day when Charles had borrowed Vera’s tin of Mansion polish to make the parquet of the dining-room into a skating-rink and Vinny had skidded its length on an Indian scatter rug.

To begin with, they haunted the second-best bedroom, trailing their fingers through Eliza’s clothes hanging in the wardrobe, looking through the treasure trove of her jewellery box as if it was a reliquary. Charles found one of Eliza’s red ribbons coiled up like a sleeping snake in a little Capodimonte pot with pink roses growing out of its lid. The Widow took it from him before he could hide it and said to Vinny, ‘This has to stop, it’s not healthy,’ and the next day when the rag-and-bone man came clopping down Hawthorn Close, Vinny was despatched to stop him and all of Eliza’s things were hauled out of the second-best bedroom and into his cart. Vinny was dubious, ‘This stuff’s worth something – we could get some money for it.’

‘I don’t want money for it,’ the Widow said coldly. ‘I want rid of it.’

Mrs Baxter – bringing out an apple for the rag-and-bone man’s horse – cried, ‘Oh, all those lovely clothes, surely you’re not giving them for rags?’ She lifted the hem of a red wool dress and said sadly, ‘Oh, I remember Mrs Fairfax wearing this, I thought she looked so lovely in it.’ The Widow waited, tight-lipped, for Mrs Baxter to go away and when she was out of hearing said, ‘I’m the only Mrs Fairfax around here!’ which, sadly, was true. ‘Nosy parker,’ Vinny said and squealed as the rag-and-bone horse nudged her from behind.

People watched with interest from behind their curtains as the pile of Eliza’s things made its slow progress around the streets of trees. The Widow had disseminated the facts of Eliza’s disappearance (‘run off with a fancy man’) less discreetly than you might have expected, usually tossing in some remark about ‘poor’ Gordon’s hitherto unnoticed asthma.

Just after the most dismal Christmas imaginable the Widow succumbed to a bad attack of flu and Vinny was left to run the business alone. The first day, the delivery boy left, the second, Ivy, their recently acquired assistant. ‘What are you doing with them?’ the Widow croaked frustratedly at her from her sick-bed. ‘Eating them?’

On a particularly grey and miserable January Saturday the Widow was still feeling too poorly to get up and Charles and Isobel were left to their own devices while she hacked and hawked in her bedroom. Mrs Baxter came knocking tentatively at the back door, offering her childsitting services but, regretfully, they had to refuse as they had firm instructions from the Widow to stay put because they were both harbouring thick colds themselves. Poor Mrs Baxter was forced to speak to them through the keyhole as Vinny had told them not to open the door to anyone.

They played on the first landing, Charles had his cars and trucks, Isobel had the farmyard animals. She placed her hen, with its brood of little yellow chickens, on to the back of a flat-bed lorry – red die-cast, Charles’ favourite.

The Widow came out of her room and complained about the noise. She was wearing a thick plaid dressing-gown and a pair of old slippers, her hair was loose, hanging in a greasy grey hank down her back. She looked like an ancient savage queen. Her voice was hoarse but it didn’t stop her from shouting at them, at the sight of so much mixed-up traffic and barnyard activity. ‘What is this mess? Clear it up,’ she said, towering over them where they were sprawled on the red and blue figured carpet runner.

She took hold of the banister-rail and said, ‘I’m going to get an aspirin,’ clutching her forehead as if she was trying to keep her head on. She had been so miserable the past few days that they couldn’t help but feel sorry for her and Charles jumped up and said, ‘I’ll get one for you, Granny,’ but Charles’ reason for jumping up with such alacrity was two-fold: a) to get the aforesaid aspirin but b) because he had a dreadful case of pins and needles. The pins and needles had rendered his left leg so numb that when he put his weight on it, it gave way and he staggered into the Widow.

This alone would not have been enough to propel her down the stairs but the jolt of Charles’ body made her put her foot out to maintain her balance and unfortunately the very spot on the carpet where she put the old-slippered foot was already occupied by the red die-cast lorry and its freight of yellow chicks. Her other foot kicked out, scattering cars and animals, while the lorry – recklessly parked at the edge of the top step – shot off the edge, taking its new cargo of slippered foot with it. Mother hen and yellow chicks were broadcast to the four winds and the Widow tumbled head over heels (or ‘arse over tip’ as Vinny would have had it) – grey hair-slippers-grey hair-slippers-grey hair – bumping off every step. Screaming. Screaming in a weird animal way, the way Mrs Baxter’s old cat did when it ate rat poison. The screaming stopped when the Widow reached the foot of the stairs. She landed awkwardly on the back of her neck so that her vacant eyes seemed to be peering up at her splayed legs. It looked like a very uncomfortable position to be in.

Very, very quickly, they picked up the red lorry and the chickens at the bottom of the stairs. Then they scampered back up the stairs, retrieving as they went the carnage the Widow had left in her wake – cows and sheep, the brown carthorse, the fire engine, the black Rover, the milk float, the tiny milk bottles and the ducks and geese – throwing them in the toy box and carrying it up to their attic.

Then they went back downstairs again, trying not to look at the Widow as they skirted past her on the stairs. They threw on their wellingtons and coats, unlocked the back door and ran out into the rain in the back garden, ignoring all prohibitions not to do so.

The Widow’s garden was always orderly and neat with well-mannered flowers – snapdragons and stock and meticulous borders in patriotic white alyssum, blue lobelia and red salvia. The velvet green of the lawn could have graced a bowling-green and the trees – lilac, pear, hawthorn and apple – were never unruly. It was not an exciting garden to play in, but, as the Widow would have said if she could only have spoken – they’d had quite enough excitement for one day.

They played doggedly at the bottom of the garden where even a child with acute hearing, let alone one with their clogged-up, catarrh-fuelled ears, would have had difficulty hearing the screams of a falling woman. That was their alibi anyway.

They could hear Vinny’s screams though as she came running out of the back door.

Weeks later, when they were playing marbles, Charles found a lone yellow chick beneath the hallstand where his marble had rolled and he held it up for his sister’s inspection. Neither of them spoke. The little yellow chick also kept its secret. Thankfully.

And so they were left to the care of vinegary Vinny, the reluctant relative, the aunt from hell – as old as the century (forty-nine) but not as modern. Nowhere near. They’d never really given Vinny much thought before, beyond how best to stay out of her way, but now that everybody else had gone there was absolutely no avoiding her any more.

Vera handed in her notice as soon as the Widow died and went to live with her sister. The idea of Vinny as the mistress of the house was too much for her. Charles moved into Vera’s room and Vinny into the Widow’s room (the best bedroom) with her cat, Grimalkin, and complained that the mattress was killing her – which made them think of the Princess and the Pea (although Vinny would have been better cast as the pea rather than the princess) and Charles indulged himself in a series of fantasies about killer mattresses because there was many a time when they would have been more than happy to see Vinny swallowed up by horsehair and ticking.

Vinny was not the kind of person to be left in charge of children. She didn’t like them for one thing, and took no pleasure in nurturing anything except her cat – a creature which provided a rare glimpse of Vinny’s soft side. It was unnerving to come into a room sometimes and find her on her hands and knees peering under the sofa, cajoling ‘Pussypussypussy’ in a kindly voice, hoarse from lack of use.

‘This is all your mother’s fault,’ Vinny fumed as she tugged at the knotted tangles in Isobel’s hair. Neglected, Isobel’s curls had grown haywire, and started to resemble a bush. ‘I’m not a bloody hairdresser,’ Vinny muttered, duelling with the Mason and Pearson hairbrush.

Charles sought refuge in bad behaviour. He got into fights at school, kicked and bit and got sent home in disgrace so that Vinny had to wallop him with the same Mason and Pearson. He raced around as if he was possessed, knocking things over, breaking things and then standing with a stupid grin on his face. He couldn’t keep still. Perhaps it was because he was born on the move. When Vinny told him off he stood with his hands on his hips and laughed like a rocking automaton – ha-ha-ha – and Vinny had to slap his face to make him stop.

He wet the bed nearly every night – which had a particularly bad effect on Vinny, bundling his sheets into the copper boiler every morning with the kind of weepings and lamentations that usually accompanied biblical disasters. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you!’ she screeched, dragging him by one of his big ears up to his room.

One of the aspects of surrogate motherhood that never ceased to astound Vinny was the fact that children grew. If the Chinese could have developed a system of whole body binding, Vinny would have been their first customer. ‘You can’t have grown!’ she screeched every time Isobel displayed stubbed toes from too tight shoes or Charles’ thin red-freckled wrists poked out from blazer cuffs. She would have had them, if she must have had them at all, as midgets. There was no right size for a child in Vinny’s eyes, of course, apart from grown-up and gone.

Charles, undersized and long overtaken by his peers, was not so much a problem as Isobel. Vinny refused point-blank to buy another new school uniform when the old one was outgrown within six months.

‘Mushrooming,’ said Mrs Baxter kindly when she came round with a parcel for Vinny’s inspection. ‘Second-hand, but awfy good condition,’ Mrs Baxter entreated.

Vinny declared that she wasn’t aware that she was in need of charity, and Mrs Baxter said, ‘Och no, no, no, no – not charity, it’s just that Mr Baxter’s school has a pool of uniforms – everyone agrees it’s a sensible idea… and I thought that… they grow out of them so quickly … such a waste to buy new when … a good idea… lots of folk think so …’ and eventually when it seemed that Vinny was doing Mrs Baxter a favour rather than the other way round, she accepted her parcel. Grudgingly and with bad grace. Could you drown in a pool of uniforms?

Charles’ clown face mooned out from beneath his Billy Bunter cap – Charles had developed a huge stock of silly expressions through which he communicated with the world, as if perhaps it would love him more because he could cross his eyes and ping-pong-ball his cheeks at the same time. Sadly this was not the case.

The cold that Charles was suffering from the day the Widow died seemed never to have left him – his nose was permanently plugged with yellow-green snot and his ears bunged up with something similar. He inhabited the underwater world of the hard-of-hearing and it was only when the school nurse referred him to the hospital that anyone discovered the extent to which Charles was lip-reading his way through life, unscrambling words, like a dyslexia of the ears or aural Scrabble. ‘You’d think he’d be able to hear,’ Vinny said, disgruntled at having to sit in the hospital waiting-room for hours, ‘when his ears are so big.’

Poor Charles, his pink Dumbo-flap ears stuck out from his head like his princely namesake’s. ‘Flying yet?’ Trevor Randall – the arch-bully at school – asked him, and instead of being sensible and slinking away in cowardice, Charles punched him in the eye and had to be beaten into repentance by Mr Baxter.

Eventually, Charles was operated on and a kindly surgeon poked a hole through his eardrums and drained out all the yellow-green snot. Unfortunately, this didn’t help him read any better and Mr Baxter still had to bounce wooden rulers off the palms of Charles’ hands to help him make out the words on the page.

Charles refrained from telling Mr Baxter that when she came back, Eliza was going to rip Mr Baxter’s head off and pull his lungs out through his neck. He was looking forward to savouring the look of astonishment on Mr Baxter’s face. Thwack! Thwack! Thwackkk! went Mr Baxter’s leather strap (or the ‘tawse’ in Mrs Baxter’s quaint language).

Vinny’s meagre nursing skills were tested to their limit by coughs and colds, viruses and infections, aches and pains, warts and verrucas – the parental loss documented by germs. Charles was hospitalized again, with a suspected appendicitis, and then discharged again, unable to explain the mysterious source of his pain.

Housekeeping of any kind was sadly wanting in Arden. Widowless, it had grown into a cold cheerless place. Vinny would only light the coal fire in the living-room when the thermometer dropped to Arctic depths. (‘Watch out for that polar bear!’ Charles said, russet eyes wide with horror and Vinny screeched and looked behind her. Ha-ha-ha.)

They wore gloves in the house and Charles sported a navy wool balaclava (knitted, very badly, for him by Vinny) that made him look like a goblin, all he needed were the two holes for his big pointed ears and the disguise would have been complete. Isobel had a pullover knitted by Mrs Baxter that had an intricate pattern of knots and ropes and cables all over it, like something a sailor might have knitted in a dream.

The house was unheated on the grounds of economy. Economy was pinchpenny Vinny’s religion (yet she made a very poor economist). ‘I’m trying to keep the wolf from the door,’ she said, and narrowed her eyes (North Sea grey) and added, ‘We’re one step away from the poorhouse.’ How could Vinny run the business and bring up children? What was she supposed to do? She brought in assistant after assistant to help in the grocery, all of whom seemed to have no purpose in life other than defrauding Vinny.

She spent long hours at night sitting at the dining-table cross-eyed over double-entry bookkeeping, unable to make sense of profit and loss. Not such a good businesswoman as Mother, it turned out.

Vinny scrimped but couldn’t save. The Widow’s huge meals were replaced by watery scrambled eggs, like lemon vomit, toast and dripping or Vinny’s ‘speciality’ – steak-and-kidney pie, a glutinous grey substance sandwiched between cardboard crusts. They were always hungry, always trying to squirrel away food into their hollow insides. Sometimes Isobel felt so hungry that she wondered if there wasn’t someone else inside her, an insatiably greedy person who had to be fed continually.

The Widow’s white linen tablecloths and silver cutlery, her flower-sprigged crockery and ivory napkin rings had all been put away as being ‘too much trouble to look after’ for Vinny. Now they ate with Wool-worths cutlery and old plaited raffia mats from Vinny’s house. ‘Serviettes,’ said Vinny, ‘are for people with servants,’ and Vinny, God forbid, was no-one’s servant. ‘God gave us a tongue to lick our lips,’ Vinny pronounced, ‘he didn’t create us with serviettes in our hands,’ an argument full of logical holes – what about cigarettes? Teacups? Rich Tea biscuits? What indeed about ‘God’, who didn’t get much of a look-in in Arden.

Mrs Baxter was quick to try and step into the mothering breach, clearly horrified by the sudden subtraction of family members – a grandmother, a father and a mother – within the space of such a short time. How? she frequently asked Mr Baxter. How could a mother leave her own children? Her ain weans? (Mrs Baxter was bilingual.) Especially such bonny ones? She must be off her head (or ‘aff her heid’).

Isobel watched for Mr Baxter marching off early for school and ran round to the back door of Sithean so that Mrs Baxter could dress her hair instead of Vinny, twirling it into neat plaits (‘pleats’) because the little girls under Mr Baxter’s care weren’t allowed to unleash their female tresses anywhere near the school building. Mrs Baxter also bought new navy blue hair-ribbons to tie up Isobel’s plaits in big bows and said, ‘There – don’t you look pretty?’ with a tremendous new-moon smile of encouragement that couldn’t quite disguise the look of doubt on her face.

Audrey’s lovely red-gold hair, hair that, let loose, flowed down her back like a rippling volcanic stream, a banner of flame, had to be roped into a big fat plait that hung almost to her waist. There was something about long untamed hair that induced Mr Baxter’s bile. ‘You should have all of that cut off,’ he said, and it seemed a miracle that Audrey’s long locks had lasted this long without being shorn.

Summer came. The back garden of Arden was taken over by weeds. Mr Baxter complained to Vinny about the state of the garden. ‘I don’t want your ruddy dandelions,’ he shouted angrily over the beech hedge. Charles waited until he’d gone inside and then blew his dandelion clocks over the hedge while Vinny crowed her approval from the back doorstep. She just didn’t understand neighbourliness.

It was Mrs Baxter who hefted out the dandelions though, Mrs Baxter who did all the gardening in Sithean. She grew raspberries and blackcurrants, potatoes, peas and runner-beans and tended the pretty Albertine rose that grew up the trellis which divided the lawn from the fruit bushes and vegetables. Bushes of rosemary, starred with tiny blue flowers, and dark spikes of lavender brushed against your legs as you walked along the garden path and the borders around the big semicircular lawn were soft and ragged with Canterbury bells that chimed delicately and delphiniums that nodded in the breeze at a pale honeysuckle braiding itself in and out of the beech hedge.

There were new people – the McDades – on Willow Road. You could tell what Mr Baxter thought of Carmen McDade’s name from the way his moustachioed top lip sneered whenever he had to pronounce it. The McDades had moved up from London and were such a big family that Mr McDade (a builder, of sorts) and Mrs McDade (a termagant) occasionally mislaid one of the smaller McDades without even noticing. ‘Backward,’ was Mr Baxter’s professional judgement on most of the McDade clan, although Mr Baxter’s definition of ‘back-ward’ was generous and had frequently included Charles. And even Mrs Baxter.

Carmen tucked her dress into her greying knickers and cartwheeled across the green lawn of Sithean. ‘A bit forward, that girl,’ Mr Baxter said with a look of distaste on his face. But how could she be both backward and forward? There was no pleasing Mr Baxter. ‘She’s only a little girl,’ Mrs Baxter protested.

‘So?’ Mr Baxter said darkly. ‘They’re all the same.’

Vinny couldn’t cope, she was losing the family business. It was all the fault of Eliza. Mrs Baxter had a solution, hovering on the back doorstep with a plate of little pink cakes. Vinny picked one up suspiciously. ‘Take them, take them, all of them,’ Mrs Baxter urged.

The fairy cakes are not themselves the solution, but ‘fostering?’

Vinny’s eyes narrow suspiciously. ‘Fostering?’ Surely not, someone prepared to take the ‘poor orphaned bairns’ off her hands? Vinny contemplated. And then nearly choked on the little cake, ‘Not orphans,’ she said, somewhat inaudibly on account of the choking, ‘they’re not orphans, their mother’s alive.’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Mrs Baxter said hastily. Mrs Baxter couldn’t remember what Eliza looked like any more. When she thought about her she saw a figure in the distance – at the bottom of the garden, in the field – someone walking away. Vinny licked her fingers clean of icing and said, ‘Why not?’ But foolish Mrs Baxter hadn’t discussed this proposition with ‘Daddy’ and he looked at her in complete disbelief. ‘You’re off your bloody head, Moira [so another one], I have to see that stupid boy all day long at school, I don’t want him in my house as well. And that girl is sullen. Do you hear?’ (‘Charles can be rather silly sometimes,’ Mr Baxter wrote in a restrained way on his Christmas report.)

Sometimes Mrs Baxter read to Isobel and she rested her head on the cushion of Mrs Baxter’s pigeon-plump breast, balanced on the other side by Audrey, and for a brief moment she forgot about Eliza and Gordon and the Widow as she listened to Mrs Baxter’s lilting peat and heather voice. Mrs Baxter was a surprisingly good storyteller, able to turn herself from a rampaging giant one minute into a tiny kitchen mouse the next.

Mrs Baxter knew the same stories as Eliza but when Eliza had told them they had frequently ended badly and contained a great deal of mutilation and torture, whereas in Mrs Baxter’s versions, the stories all had happy endings. Mrs Baxter’s Red Riding Hood, for example, was rescued by her woodcutter father who butchered the wolf and slit it open to reveal a grandmother as good as new and, needless to say, everyone lived happily ever after. In Eliza’s version, on the other hand, everyone usually died, even Little Red Riding Hood.

Sometimes when they got to the end of a story, where everything had been put right and justice done, Mrs Baxter would sigh and say, ‘What a shame that life’s not really like that.’ Mr Baxter didn’t know about these reading sessions – Mr Baxter disapproved wholeheartedly of fairy stories (‘stuff and nonsense’) although whether he had a whole heart was debatable.

One day, Mr Baxter came home unexpectedly early from school and found the three of them in front of a blazing fire. Mrs Baxter was reading, her index finger following every line – because she couldn’t find her reading-glasses – and at the point when Red Riding Hood was filling up her little basket with custards, they all suddenly became aware of Mr Baxter’s presence in the doorway. Mrs Baxter’s body gave a little spasm, like a frightened rabbit, and her reading-finger halted mysteriously on the word ‘bobbin’.

Mr Baxter fixed them with his little pebble eyes behind his little pebble glasses for a long time before saying, ‘Unlike her stupid brother, the girl can read perfectly well for herself, Moira – I should know, I taught her myself. And as for you, Audrey, you can go up to your room and do the extra arithmetic I set you.’ Audrey scurried out of the room and Mrs Baxter said, ‘Oh dear, Daddy, we were only reading. What harm is there in that?’

Next day, Mrs Baxter had one eye so swollen that she couldn’t open it. ‘Walked into a door,’ she explained while brushing Isobel’s hair, ‘silly me.’ Audrey was sitting at the breakfast-table with a bowl of cornflakes in front of her and kept lifting her spoon to her lips except it was the same spoonful of flakes over and over again. There were no more stories after that.

‘Wait till our mother comes back!’ Charles shouted at Vinny after a particularly vicious attack with the Mason and Pearson and Vinny snarled, ‘I’d like to see that!’ Vinny was doing her best to eradicate all traces of Eliza. The past wasn’t a real place to Vinny. She never talked about it, she was a non-historian, the anti-archivist of all that had happened to them – retaining no souvenirs, no artefacts, no documents, no photographs, obliterating the evidence of their previous happy existence. Vinny made bonfires of the past, made bonfires of everything, nothing was safe from her flames.

Every week Vinny would stand in the back garden of Arden tending her bonfire, enveloped in a pall of smoke, ashes being tossed in the air around her like a medieval witch at the stake.

Eliza had been gone over a year. When was she coming back? Why was she taking so long? Sometimes it seemed as though the white fog that had enveloped them in Boscrambe Woods had got into their brains in some way. Perhaps that was how Gordon died too, not fog in his lungs, but fog clouding his brain, driving him mad. Perhaps the fog in the wood had driven Eliza mad, for she must have gone mad to leave them in the clutches of Vinny. She would never leave them, not voluntarily, not all the fancy men in the world could have persuaded her away from them. Surely?

Vinny’s hair had gone completely grey, every time she passed the hall mirror, she stroked her convent coif and said, ‘Look what you’ve done to me,’ as if it was the mirror that had caused her problems.

Madge-in-Mirfield, now nursing an intimate and deadly cancer, couldn’t help, her three grown-up girls didn’t want to know. But Madge had a friend who knew someone who’d always wanted – ‘Two little children?’ Vinny asked hopefully, on a hospital visit.

‘No,’ Madge said, ‘a little boy.’

‘Well, that’s better than nothing, I suppose.’

‘It’s all Eliza’s fault,’ Madge said.

Charles was very, very lucky, Vinny said. But he wouldn’t stay lucky if he was a naughty boy. Mr and Mrs Crosland had a big car and expensive coats. Mr Crosland wore long camel and Mrs Crosland wore long beaver, even though it was a hot August day, and Isobel wanted to rub her face in the fur when Mrs Crosland sat in the living-room, drinking tea. ‘Poor little thing,’ Mrs Crosland said to Charles. Not-so-little Charles (a broad and stocky eight-year-old by now) stared rudely. Mrs Crosland didn’t even glance at Isobel. Vinny pointed out Charles’ good points like a pedigree breeder and Mrs Crosland murmured approvingly at her new pet.

Charles was in a cloud of misunderstanding – Vinny had not been entirely truthful, leading him to believe that Isobel was coming along as part of a package deal. They hadn’t seen Vinny filling only the one suitcase. When the Croslands had finished their tea and used up their limited repertoire of small talk, Mrs Crosland said, ‘Well thank you very much, Mrs Fitzgerald, I wish you all the best,’ and climbed into the back of the big car. She patted the seat next to her and said, ‘Come along, Charles,’ and Charles reluctantly got in and was lapped in fur.

Vinny slammed the car door and Mr Crosland started the engine, lifting one hand in farewell without looking behind as he drove away in a crunching of gravel. Mrs Crosland waved a ringed hand and mouthed goodbye with her big crimson lips. Charles’ pale face rose up behind the glass of the car window, his yelling silenced by the noise of the car engine. The car moved away slowly, down Chestnut Avenue and Charles’ face reappeared in the back window. He seemed to be trying to claw his way through the glass.

His head disappeared suddenly as if someone had just yanked invisibly on his ankles and the car accelerated down the road and turned into Sycamore Street, performing exactly the same disappearing trick as Gordon had already performed, but going in the opposite direction. As with him, there was no reversing back round the corner, no cries of ‘Surprise!’ from the car’s occupants.

Isobel ran after the car until she got a stitch and could run no more and then stood helplessly in the middle of the road so that the butcher’s delivery boy, whizzing carelessly round the corner on his bike, had to swerve so wildly to avoid the little sobbing figure that he toppled over and the road was strewn with ration-sized parcels of meat and Vinny was able to secure a thin link of sausages in her apron pocket as she pulled Isobel to her feet and dragged her all the way home.

The dead of night, the world was dark and empty but nothing was frightening any more, not after the wood. Not so dark really, a full moon at the window gave everything a dull gleam, like pewter. This was the time to escape, to shin down the drainpipe, run across the wet grass of the lawn. The only noise in the house was the creak-creak sound of Mrs Crosland’s snoring. Charles slid out of bed and felt the long carpet pile between his toes. His clothes were lying on a chair and he crept over to them. He seemed to have shrunk. His eyes were lower than the level of the top of the chair, his nose only reached the doorknob. His toenails click-clacked on the lino at the edge of the room.

Everything in the room was drained of colour, everything turned to shades of grey. When he listened, he could hear that the house wasn’t silent at all – he could hear the mice eating in the pantry, the Croslands’ old cat dreaming (about chasing the mice). Smells flooded his brain – the dust trapped in the rugs, the old gravy scents coming up from the kitchen, the carnation talcum powder Mrs Crosland had spilled in the bathroom. The smell of petrol seeping up from the garage made him heady, he prowled around the room trying to think, for once strangely comfortable inside his skin.

He loped over to the dressing-table in the corner of the room. The moon had turned the dressing-table mirror into steel. He could see the moon in the mirror, he could see his face in the mirror – no. No. It wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be. Charles raised his head and let out a tremendous howl of fear, running away from the mirror and leaping onto the bed and burying his head under the covers. In the morning it would all be different. Wouldn’t it?

A week after he was kidnapped by the Croslands, Charles reappeared in a sudden unexpected rasping of gravel. The rear door of the car opened and – surprise! – Charles spilled out on to the ground so quickly that you would have almost thought he’d been pushed. The car door slammed again and the window was rolled down.

Mrs Crosland’s face, powdered and lacquered like a Japanese geisha, appeared. ‘He bites,’ she announced, her voice resonating with disgust. ‘He bites ferociously,’ and Mr Crosland shouted over his shoulder, ‘That child’s backward, Mrs Fitzgerald!’ Then the Croslands drove away in a bad-tempered wrenching of gears. Charles sat cross-legged on the gravel, swaying backwards and forwards like a rocking Buddha and laughing his clown laugh ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha at the sight of their car retreating down the drive.

The important thing about the disappearing trick – something that Eliza and Gordon seemed to have failed to grasp – is that the real skill was coming back again after you’d vanished. Unlike his parents, Charles had mastered both halves of the trick and to celebrate he executed a mad jigging polka of triumph up and down the drive – until he tripped and cut himself and Vinny said, ‘I could have told you it would end in tears.’

Vinny was in the process of destroying Fairfax and Son, partly through alienating the customers (‘Well, which do you want – Cheddar or Cheshire? Make up your mind, I haven’t got all day!’) and partly through appallingly bad management. Eventually she had to sell it at a knockdown price to a competitor and also sold her little terrace house on Willow Road, to a couple called Miller and every time she drove past her old house on the bus Vinny said, ‘The Millers got a bargain there.’ Vinny was Mrs Hard-Done-By, and nothing, but nothing, would ever be right in her world. Especially not her relatives.

‘We’ll be in the poorhouse soon,’ she informed them. But she had an idea – they will take in lodgers, for what is the use of a house with five bedrooms if only three of them are occupied? Eh? They will give one of them over to a lodger.

Dimly, Vinny discerned that her poor housekeeping might not appeal to the paying-guest and she set about improving her housecraft. She studied the Widow’s housekeeping books – an entire kitchen shelf of aideménage – The Housewife’s Handy Book, Aunt Kitty’s Cookery Book, Everything Within, The Modern Housewife’s Book (for once upon a time the Widow was a very modern housewife). For a while, Vinny’s enthusiasm even expanded to include the hobby section of Everything Within and she attempted, amongst other useful things, ‘Sealing-Wax Craft’ and ‘A Dainty Craft with Cellophane and Silk Raffia’. It was very disturbing to come into the kitchen and find Vinny elbow-deep in papier mâché (the colour of her skin) or attempting to scale the artistic heights of ‘Loofah Craft’, clip-clipping away with scissors at the bathroom loofah to make a floral still life for the Unknown Lodger’s room.

But infinitely worse was the ancienne cuisine which Vinny had suddenly become a disciple of, dishes dredged up from the cookery sections of the Widow’s books that reeked of England between the wars. Dishes for which they must be guinea-pigs. ‘Spaghetti Fritters’, ‘Rabbit Soup with Curry’, ‘Compote of Pigeons with Brain Sauce’. Vinny liked nothing better than recipes that began, ‘Take a large Cod and boil whole …’

‘This is disgusting,’ Charles ventured over something called a ‘Boiled Cow-Heel Pudding’.

‘Disgusting is as disgusting does,’ Vinny said unhelpfully. They never, ever, thought that they’d feel nostalgic for Vinny’s old way of cooking.

Once Vinny considered she’d mastered landlady cuisine she turned her attention to the bedding, searching the depths of the Widow’s linen cupboard and bringing out several pairs of Irish linen sheets which were only slightly mildewed. ‘You wouldn’t get anything better in a hotel,’ she declared. Vinny had no idea what the quality of hotel bedding was, never having slept between any, but that didn’t stop her fantasizing that Hotel Arden was about to give the Ritz a run for its money. Charles and Isobel couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to lodge with them when the mattresses were so thin and the custard so lumpy.

Almost as soon as Vinny declared herself ready to take on all-comers, their first lodger appeared. Vinny was a little surprised because she hadn’t even worked out how to advertise for one yet, but Mr Rice turned up on the doorstep ready with references and a proper-lodger kind of job – travelling salesman.

Mr Rice was aged somewhere between thirty-five and sixty-five and had an enormous handlebar moustache, possibly to compensate for the fact that most of his dark brown hair had been devoured by baldness so that the thing he most resembled was a boiled egg. Charles and Isobel exchanged dismal looks because they couldn’t imagine anyone more boring. ‘Don’t worry,’ Vinny said, ‘there’s plenty more where he came from.’

Mr Rice wore loud dogtooth-check jackets and mustard waistcoats and claimed he was a pilot during the war. ‘Who’s he kidding?’ Vinny scoffed, but behind his back because she wanted his money.

‘Here we are,’ Vinny said, heading new lodgerwards, ‘a nice plate of “Sweetbreads Royale”.’ Chatelaine Vinny – a bleak housekeeper in hard times. ‘Well, Mr Rice,’ Vinny said, shaving slices off an unidentified roasted mammal at the Sunday dinner-table, ‘how d’you like it here then?’ Mr Rice is ‘a gentleman’ in Vinny’s estimation and his arrival makes her quite skittish for a while.

At first she simpered, bowed and scraped to Mr Rice, wringing her hands in ever-so-humbleness and Mr Rice responded by praising her landladying skills to the skies when you might have expected him instead to puzzle over the ‘Haddock Soufflé’, and query the damp in his room and the disturbing character of some of his dinners (‘Boiled Toad in the Hole,’ Vinny announced, shy, yet proud, of her newfound talents).

At breakfast and tea, Mr Rice regaled them with tales from the road. ‘A very funny thing happened to me in Birmingham this week, did I tell you?’ he asked over a dish of ‘Scotch Sheep’s Pluck’, that Vinny had laboured over all afternoon. Mr Rice had no sense of humour, in fact, if it was possible he had a negative sense of humour so that they knew that any story prefaced ‘A funny thing happened’ was inevitably going to be unbelievably tedious. What’s more, funny things happened to Mr Rice all the time so that they rarely endured a mealtime without passing out from boredom.

‘Mr Tapioca! Mr Sago!’ Charles hooted, his forehead hitting the table as he doubled up in a maniacal sotto voce laugh. Isobel worried for Charles. He was nine years old now, yet half the time he behaved like his three-year-old self. Mr Rice appeared not to notice and helped himself to a spoonful of grey boiled potatoes and waxed lyrical about home comforts. ‘Silly, silly boy!’ Vinny hissed at Charles.

‘Ah,’ Mr Rice said, sniffing like a Bisto Kid as Vinnie handed over his slice of ‘Sheep’s Tongue Shape’.

Vinny took a cigarette packet from the pocket of her Empire overall and lit up. Her gnarled hands cupped around the cigarette would have looked better on a large bird of prey. She closed her eyes and sucked hard, with an expression that suggested pain rather than pleasure, and then blew the smoke out of her nostrils, while she dished up an exotic ‘Railway Pudding’.

‘Delicious,’ proclaimed Mr Rice, a dribble of yellow custard creeping down his chin. Vinny batted her meagre eyelashes in a way that might have been interpreted as flirtatious. ‘Something in your eye, Mrs Fitzgerald?’ Mr Rice inquired through a mouthful of pudding.

* * *

‘Parallel universes,’ Charles said to Mr Rice, eager to expound his new theories to a listening ear, over a tea-table groaning with ‘Croquettes of Liver’. ‘What if there were other worlds where we had other selves – living out quite different lives, so say, Vinny was a film star [flattered, Vinny cast a rare smile of appreciation in Charles’ direction] or Izzie here was the queen of an unknown country and I was –’ Charles searched for a parallel life he would like – ‘I was an Olympic athlete or a famous Shakespearian actor or a rocket scientist …’ All this while, Mr Rice was staring at Charles as if he were a lunatic and when Charles’ imagination finally ran down he fixed him with an unpoetic eye and said to him, ‘You need to get a life, son,’ and Charles blushed a colour that clashed horribly with his hair. But really there was only one parallel universe that they wanted to inhabit – the one where they had parents and, for preference, the same ones they had had before.

Another year passed. And then another. Eliza grew dark, stranded in the passage of time, growing into a memory. People were always telling Isobel that she looked foreign – Spanish or Italian – could Eliza have had Spanish blood? Vinny peered down the long dark tunnel to the past and saw something dimly, heard the vague word ‘Celtic’ and said, ‘Not Spanish – Irish, I think.’

‘Did she sound Irish?’ Charles asked eagerly.

‘Sound?’ Vinny repeated helplessly. A whiff of Hempstid wafted down the tunnel. ‘She sounded … ridiculous,’ Vinny concluded. Eliza’s faded and forgotten image plagued them. Where was she? Why didn’t she come back? Why did no-one from her world come back? A sister or a brother? An aunt or a godmother? If Eliza couldn’t come back then why not a childhood friend, someone knocking on the door saying, ‘I knew your mother’? Someone who could tell them the little things – the books she liked to read, her favourite food, the season she liked best.

‘Maybe somebody’s kidnapped her,’ Charles theorized, ‘and held her captive against her will even though she pleaded with him to let her go so she could get back to her children?’

‘Didn’t she have a mother or a father?’

‘Questions, questions, questions,’ Vinny snapped irritably, ‘can’t you ask anything else?’

Isobel discovered the provenance of Audrey’s hair (the genetic origins of Charles’ remained mysterious however). Mrs Baxter’s sister, Rhona, came to visit from South Africa and fingered Audrey’s hair as if it was something precious and said, ‘This is our mother’s hair, Moira,’ and Mrs Baxter said, ‘I ken that, Rhona,’ and their eyes filled up with tears.

Mr Baxter didn’t approve of this sentimental hair, didn’t really approve of Mrs Baxter’s sister with her cheerful disposition and easy-going laughter. He looked put out when he came into the kitchen and found them all gathered round the Formica of the kitchen table, looking sad at the memory of maternal hair, and he rounded on Audrey, ‘You know you’d be better employed learning your times-tables – you haven’t even mastered the sixes yet,’ before beating a hasty retreat in the face of so much hair-induced emotion.

‘What a Gradgrind,’ Mrs Baxter’s sister laughed when he’d gone and Mrs Baxter smiled nervously and cut into a cherry and almond Madeira which signalled itself boldly with a circle of glacé cherries like big drops of bright blood.

The advent of Mrs Baxter’s sister brought much reminiscing with it. Until their mother died they’d had an idyllic childhood apparently. ‘Full of fun and games, we were always up to high doh, weren’t we, Moira?’ Despite years under an African sun, Mrs Baxter’s sister still had her lovely lilting accent, with its hints of heather and hills, and sang ‘John Anderson, my jo’ so beautifully that Mrs Baxter wept. ‘Oh aye,’ Mrs Baxter said with a faraway smile, ‘they were grand days.’ Whenever Mrs Baxter mentioned her life before Mr Baxter she became very wistful.

What happened in idyllic childhoods? ‘We-el,’ Rhona said, ‘picnics, dressing up, putting on wee plays’ – hoots of laughter from both of them at this particular memory – ‘then we played a lot of games, our mother knew such good games—’ At this point Mrs Baxter screamed and flapped her hands in the air and then ran from the room and reappeared, breathlessly, a few minutes later, thrusting a small red book into her sister’s hands. At this, Rhona also lost the power of speech, dancing up and down on the spot and screeching. ‘The Home Entertainer – you’ve still got it!’

‘I have,’ Mrs Baxter beamed.

‘Poison Spot,’ Mrs Baxter laughed with tears welling in her eyes. ‘Lemon Golf? Few things can roll more unexpectedly than a lemon!’ she read out loud from the instructions.

‘Human Croquet!’ Mrs Baxter’s sister said, in transports of delight. ‘That was my favourite.’ They played it, she explained, on the lawn of the manse. ‘We had a lovely lawn. So green,’ she added with an exile’s sigh. ‘Of course, you need a lot of people for Human Croquet.’

‘And they all have to be in the spirit of the game,’ Mrs Baxter added.

‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Baxter’s sister agreed.

In the end they raided the fruit bowl, first for a game of Lemon Golf, played on the living-room carpet with an assortment of instruments – walking-sticks, an old hockey stick, a chair leg from the understairs cupboard and (as you would expect) lemons. This was followed by an energetic game of Orange Battle in which even Audrey became animated, and the untimely arrival of Mr Baxter – just as Mrs Baxter was flailing with her teaspoon at her sister’s orange – couldn’t quite dissipate the party atmosphere.

Mrs Baxter’s sister returned to South Africa the next day and her departure left Mrs Baxter very sad. And very clumsy, it seemed, for she was black and blue all over, like a bad joke. ‘I fell down the stairs,’ she said, ‘silly me.’ Silly Mrs Baxter really ought to be more careful.

Time had flown. Seven years of it. Eliza was never coming back, she may as well be as dead as Gordon.

Arden was in decay, there was wet-rot in the floors and dry-rot in the stairs. The windows stuck, the doors jammed. The wallpaper peeled. The dusty drops of the Widow’s chandelier were laced with gossamer cobwebs and chimed and tinkled in the fierce draughts that gusted through Arden, as if Boreas and Eurus were holding a competition somewhere in the vicinity of the front hall or the great eagle Hraesvelg was flying up and down just to annoy them.

While all the other houses on the streets of trees were being modernized and brought up to date, Arden had remained untouched since the master-builder nailed in the last slate himself.

The garden had become home to toad and frog, mouse and mole and a million garden birds. The nettles were waist-high, the soil latticed with ground-elder and a tangle of brambles was slowly clawing its way across the garden towards the back door. The Widow would have had a fit.

‘There’s somebody at the back door,’ Vinny said, staring into the flames of the fire like an old sibylline cat. Vinny had a mouldering air about her too – dust caught in the cracks in her skin and her thin hair was turning to cobwebs. ‘I didn’t hear anyone,’ replied Charles (now a deeply unattractive thirteen year old).

‘That doesn’t mean there isn’t someone there,’ Vinny said.

The glassy eye of the remains of a ‘Baked Cod’s Head’ followed Charles as he walked through the kitchen to the back door. He opened the door and found Vinny was right. A man was standing on the doorstep. He took off his hat and, smiling sadly, said, ‘Charles?’ in a cracked voice. Charles took a step backwards.

‘Remember me, old chap?’ Charles couldn’t have been more shocked if an alien spacecraft had just landed in the kitchen and a squad of Martians trooped out. ‘Daddy?’ he said in a small voice.

Vinny grumbled her way into the kitchen but when she saw Gordon the power of speech left her. She went quite green. ‘Vin?’

‘There you are,’ Vinny said finally. Isobel came in to the kitchen and looked with interest at this stranger – there was something odd about him, something not quite right, but she didn’t know what it was.

‘Daddy?’ Charles repeated. Daddy? How could this be possible? Gordon was dead, killed by the pea-souper, he’d been dead for over seven years. Was he a ghost? He had the eyes of a ghost, but not a ghost’s pallor, he was lean and brown as if he’d been working in the sun. When they thought of Gordon they thought of the man in the silver-framed photograph – the RAF uniform, the cheerful smile, the wavy hair. This Gordon – ghost or impostor – had short cropped hair, lightened by the sun and what smile he could muster was far from cheerful.

‘Daddy?’ Charles repeated helplessly.

‘Pleased to see me, old chap?’ Gordon whispered, barely able to speak for emotion.

‘But, Daddy – you’re dead,’ Isobel said.

‘Dead?’ Gordon said, looking inquisitively at Vinny who shrugged as if to say it was nothing to do with her. ‘You told them I was dead ?’ Gordon persisted.

‘Mother thought it was for the best,’ Vinny replied testily. ‘We thought you wouldn’t be coming back.’

The story had suddenly changed. Gordon was alive, not dead, perhaps the first known traveller to return from the undiscovered country. The world was no longer subject to the rules of logic where the dead were dead and the quick walked the earth. He’d never walked into the wall of fog, never drowned in the pea-soup. That was all a mistake. ‘Somebody made a mistake?’ Charles said incredulously. Yes, Gordon agreed, staring grimly at the wall behind them so that they both turned to see if there was someone there. There wasn’t.

Someone (a dead person) had been wrongly identified as Gordon, the real Gordon had been suddenly struck by amnesia and gone abroad to live in New Zealand, not knowing he was the real Gordon, not knowing who he was. Not knowing anything. Perhaps Gordon had played too many games of Lost Identity and become confused? ‘Amnesia,’ they overheard him telling people later, in the same way that they had once heard the Widow saying ‘Asthma’ after he drove away from Arden a lifetime ago. The two words were very similar – perhaps the Widow and Gordon had got them muddled up somehow?

‘I’ve got someone I want you to meet,’ Gordon said, with a hopeful little smile. ‘She’s waiting in the car.’

Charles made a funny noise as if he was suffocating. ‘Is it Mummy?’ he asked, strung out somewhere between impossible hope and overwhelming despair. Gordon’s features contracted in a grimace and Vinny said quickly, as if to explain, ‘Ran off with a fancy man.’ Gordon stared at her as if he was having trouble understanding and Vinny repeated impatiently, ‘Eliza, she ran off with a fancy man.’ Gordon looked sick at the mention of Eliza’s name.

‘Is she?’ Charles said urgently.

‘Is who what, old chap?’ Gordon looked dazed.

‘Is Mummy in the car with you?’

Gordon seemed to contemplate the answer to this question for a long time but finally he shook his head slowly and said, ‘No, no she isn’t.’

‘Hello there,’ a bright little voice said suddenly and all four of them flinched and turned to stare at the person standing on the back doorstep. ‘I’m your new mummy.’

The second coming of Eliza was no longer just around the corner, with its restoration of real right justice and suffering rewarded (the happy ending). And if the dead Gordon could become alive then perhaps the living Eliza could turn up dead. ‘Wherever she is,’ Charles said sadly, ‘she’s never coming back, let’s face it, Izzie.’

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