Happy Birthday and All That (2 page)

She and Frank had been together for years now. They'd first shared the upstairs of a Victorian house with a turret and slates and a pointy roof that made Frank think of the Dragonmobile in Wacky Races. The weekend that Posy found out that she was pregnant was the weekend after her father had died of liver failure. Her mother had died two years earlier of cancer, caused, Posy and her sister Flora were certain, by years of walking around with internally clenched fists, years of biting her lip and swallowing her feelings and anger in case she invoked the wrath of their father. Posy and Flora were left the Surrey Tudorbethan house they so hated. They sold it, and at twenty-five Posy had tens of thousands of pounds. She was
glad that her father hadn't known about her baby. She was planning to break the cycle, to be with someone not like Daddy. She married Frank.

Frank advocated throwing Posy's inheritance in the river, or giving it anonymously to a centre for alcoholics or the homeless or battered women. Posy thought he was probably right. She had hated that house. Every room had held some horrible tableau. The dining room was probably the worst, all the farcical family dinners, and the time he'd smashed their Easter eggs. Biff, biff, biff, his slow hand like a cartoon fist. He'd been jealous of the pretty eggs, even though he'd said he didn't want one, that he hated chocolate.

‘Bloody great idea for a religion,' he'd growled. ‘Glorification of a Roman torture method!'

The real reason was that he felt excluded from something the ‘girls' had. They'd watched open-mouthed, three empty eggshapes, and then Flora and Posy had fled to their friends round the corner, leaving their mother to face the music, again. The friends had been out, on the sort of Easter Sunday walk on Tadworth Common that other people's families went on. They'd walked down to the garage and bought each other and their mother the only eggs left. Caramac.

Posy decided to buy the biggest, most beautiful house she could afford. It was Edwardian with five bedrooms, sash windows, fireplaces and stained glass, and overlooked Southampton Common. She had fallen in love before she'd even crossed the doormat. The hall had black and white tiles. There were so many rooms that she and Frank joked that they could spend the whole day there and never meet. They could sleep in different postcodes. There was a lot to be done, but she thought that they would slowly do it all.

When Posy chose her house she had no idea about the wildlife that would come with it. There were foxes and badgers and squirrels on the Common across the road from them, a hedgehog in their garden. A grey squirrel liked to sit
on their fence and eat from Plested Pie bags and Ginsters pasty wrappers. Their garden was visited by woodpeckers and wood pigeons, chaffinches, treecreepers, wagtails, goldfinches and bullfinches. She wondered if it was the proximity to the Common that gave them such huge spiders, spiders whose steps across the ceiling at night were audible, spiders that terrified Poppy.

Until she had her house Posy hadn't known that slugs came so big, or in such an array of colours: horrible oranges, deathly greys and colourless ones like creatures from the deepest, coldest oceans. Perhaps that came from living under the Parousellis' bath and in the cupboard under their sink. She never knew when she was going to come across some fresh horror. And having children made it much worse. Today there had been a curled-up, dessicated caterpillar in James's pocket. Trouser fluff had clogged its little boots. She had taken it into the garden and tried to revive it in a puddle. She left it beside some tasty-looking leaves. When she checked later it had disappeared, but she feared the worst. She decided that she would have to talk to James about it, explain that caterpillars had a right to freedom. He would probably cry, even though she'd tell him that it had probably survived and crawled away. Oh remorse, remorse.

There was ivy growing on the front of the house. Posy chopped it back and tried to drag it down when it managed to penetrate the windows. It forced its way in overnight, coming through the gaps between the upper and lower casements. If ever they went away, Posy imagined that it would have taken over the house by the time they came back. They'd return to find it sleeping in their bed; it would finish the jam and let dirty mugs pile up in the sink.

The house had leaks and missing tiles, and rattling, rotting windows. The outlines of the floorboards were visible through some of the carpets.

‘Don't pay someone to do it. I'll fix it,' Frank said for the
first few years, but he never did. Eventually all the money was gone, and paying someone was no longer a possibility. Posy looked longingly at the ads for builders and roofers and handymen in the back of the
Advertiser.
She knew that there was an underground stream nearby. She thought that it was flowing away with her chi, as well as causing the damp stripes along the walls. Frank had no time for any of it.

‘Hey! I thought I married a Bohemian, someone with values, so why are you always spluttering about guttering? Did you ever see a house fall down? Well, did you?' he asked.

‘Re-pointing is necessary!' Posy said. ‘I keep having bad dreams about falling through rotten floorboards. Other people's windows aren't like this.'

‘Oh Pose, you don't want to fall for any of that replacement windows crap. It's all a scam. A capitalist plot.'

‘I didn't say
replacement
windows. Perhaps when Isobel's a bit older I could do some of them myself.' Perhaps she would sit happily in her pram whilst Posy rubbed down, filled and repainted some of the windows.

‘Why don't you get Flora to sort the windows out for you?'

‘Because we haven't got any money.'

Flora was the ideal person to solve the Parousellis' damp and window problems, to re-point everything. She was the proprietor of ‘Perfect Solutions', a company dedicated to sorting things out. ‘If it's legal we'll do it!' the leaflet boasted. Flora organised parties, anniversary celebrations, sometimes whole weddings. She cleared out cupboards, streamlined houses (feng shui an optional extra), imposed filing systems, hired and fired cleaners and gardeners, obtained quotes and engaged plumbers, builders, roofers and handypeople of all descriptions. She easily tackled the simpler repairs herself. She did other people's Christmas shopping. The floor plan of John Lewis was behind her eyes like a circuit board. Her clients received complimentary Christmas presents from Perfect Solutions: L'Occitane
lavender bath milk for the women, a delicious-smelling, soothing shaving gel for the men. Perfect Solutions knew how busy and stressed they were, that they needed a treat. Flora had even written people's thank-you letters for them. She assembled self-assembly furniture. The coming of Ikea to Southampton would see her profits soar.

Flora managed all of this without ever getting her cuffs dirty. She always wore very clean, very crisp, linen shirts, often with matching trousers that gave her a stern Maoist look and impressed her clients.

Even as a child Flora had been unnaturally neat. As an eight-year-old she had chided Posy for not closing cupboards or shutting her drawers properly. On the last day of each term she'd look as neat and shiny as on the first. Her possessions endured for ever. At thirty-six she still had a mauve-plastic folding brush and comb set that she'd bought at Superdrug when she was fourteen. She had the world's tidiest make-up bag (no clogged mascara, or stubby lipsticks, or damp, cracked compact). Her bars of soap stayed immaculate even to the last sliver. The only thing that threatened to slip out of her control was her bright yellow hair, which was curly and tended towards the frizzy. It had to be restrained in a very tight plait. Posy's hair was similar, but she let it do what it wanted, and it made a wild brown halo around her face.

It had been seeing Posy struggle at Christmas when James and Poppy were small that gave Flora the idea for Perfect Solutions.

‘I hate Christmas. It's a route-march of consumerism with slave labour by women!' Posy had raged just out of earshot of her children. ‘I was up till midnight making a sheep's outfit, and tonight I've got to make a page's outfit. And tomorrow night I'll have to do all the cards. I have to home-make everything because you can't buy any Christmas food that won't possibly contain traces of nuts. And then James will
probably reject it all anyway, and just want soft-scoop raspberry-ripple ice cream instead.'

‘Make Frank do more then,' Flora said.

‘Oh he's hopeless. He acts as though all the present-buying and wrapping, and cards and shopping and decorations were some folly of mine, some private hobby that he shouldn't interfere with. And nobody except you will get me any good presents, even though I'll have spent hundreds of hours on everybody else. What I really need is a wife.'

Posy wanted someone kind and unflappable, a sort of human Renault Espace. Someone who would remember to buy kitchen roll, who would empty the bin without being asked, who would always have plasters and antiseptic wipes in her bag. Someone with a smooth, gentle face, and soft, strong arms.

‘I need someone like you full-time,' she told Flora. She wasn't really thinking of Flora. She was thinking of her friend Kate. She had once dreamt that she'd been browsing the stalls at the Pre-School Christmas Fayre hand-in-hand with Kate. They knew how many jelly beans there were in the jar, and had correctly guessed the weight of the cake. They had watched the clown show together. The children were off, safely engaged elsewhere.

The reality was that Kate would be running the raffle and Posy would be doing one of the less popular stalls; shelling out endless 20ps, whilst trying to restrain (at least a little bit) James and Poppy's acquisitiveness and passion for gambling on the Beany Baby tombola. Her youngest would be thrashing in her arms, desperate to be crawling around on the hall's dirty floor, to get under the stalls and to be scalded by cups of tea.

The grass on the Common was studded with cigarette butts and turning to yellow dust, but the Parousellis still went there nearly every day. They hadn't been away this year. (Izzie was too young for a holiday to be a holiday.)

Oh August, low season for fetes, bazaars and jumbles. Posy was getting withdrawal symptoms. Her love of them was genetic. Her mother had always been on their school's PTA, and would do the book stall or the white elephant - something that didn't require her to make anything. Aunt Is was a queen of fetes. Every weekend there seemed to be one. Her friend Beatrice (known to the girls as Aunt Bea) made felt animals, and they donated honey for sale. If they weren't manning a stall, then they would take their young visitors to somebody else's Open Garden or at the very least to the WI market for a haul of jam and cakes.

‘Tuck in! Tuck in, girls!' they'd say; words to gladden any heart.

The girls often stayed with Aunt Is in the holidays. The time dragged. Aunt Is lived in St Cross, in a house overlooking the Watermeadows. Sometimes the girls would walk along Kingsgate Road and into Winchester. If they were by themselves they could go into Bluebells, their favourite shop, and buy the sort of things that their aunt thought utterly pointless - smelly rubbers, magnetic cats, mini dried-flower paperweights, Flower Fairy notebooks and pens - and they thought necessary to their happiness.

‘Utter junk,' Aunt Is said. ‘Lot of nonsense, no use to anyone.' These opinions didn't stop her from decamping to Cornwall to help Aunt Bea run the North Cornwall Bee Centre with its own gift shop and café, some years later.

Posy and Flora tried to make the walks as long as they could, visiting any museum that was free, looking in the charity shops, stopping to listen to any busker or street entertainer who didn't look liable to involve them or embarrass them. They patted the bronze boar near the Courts, they browsed (pointless! pointless!) the Tourist Information Bureau. They would even look at whatever exhibition the Guildhall was sporting: The Guild of Embroiderers, Rotary
Regalia … The citizens of Winchester seemed oblivious to the prison on the hill, and went about their Hunter-booted business as though it wasn't there, about to slide down on a lava flow and engulf them all. Flora and Posy sat on the steps of the Buttercross and drank Coke. They sat on benches in the Cathedral Close and read and read. Sometimes there was a film crew working on an adaptation. They hoped that they might be spotted.

‘We'd be great as Elizabeth and Jane Bennet,' Flora said, even though Posy hadn't done
Pride and Prejudice
yet, and was doomed to get
Mansfield Park
for O level. ‘But I bet we'd end up as Mary and Kitty.'

Aunt Is always took them on a tour of the Cathedral. She was an official guide and on duty at least twice a month. The highpoint of their visit would be a trip to the Theatre Royal where they would eat ice cream in the interval and never, ever, go to the bar.

Much of the time was spent taking the dogs to the Watermeadows. They liked to walk past a house where a parrot called Persephone lived. The girls stopped and peered. Persephone's owner waved, but never invited them in.

Aunt Is knew every dog that they met. Flora and Posy were introduced. There were long conversations about swans. If they went by themselves one of the dogs always ran away, meaning the girls yelled and searched and worried, and finally trailed the useless lead home to find that the dog had beaten them there, and was tucking in to a dinner of biscuits mixed with raw cabbage and carrot and pilchards.

‘Demon Hound!' Aunt Is barked, handing round pieces of crumbly fudge, that might have been toffee, or perhaps Kendal Mint Cake. Often Posy and Flora couldn't imagine how the time until the next meal could possibly be filled. Fortunately there were many meals each day, most of them involving jam. There was a whole cupboard devoted to it.

Every summer Flora rearranged the jars, putting the newest at the back, and explained the system to Aunt Is who laughed and said, ‘Thank you, Flora.' But still five-year-old jars rubbed shoulders on the table with the only just bought. The Aunts spooned the green layers off the top (‘Penicillin. Can only do you good'). Posy chose honey, mostly because she had a crush on Rupert Brooke. Aunt Is had a 1915 edition of ‘1914'. Posy propped it up on the bedside table so that she could look at it as she fell asleep.