Man at the Helm (7 page)

We knew of only one available woman in the parish. This woman had a card in the newsagent’s. This woman, Audrina, was good at cleaning apparently but was also a spirit medium – a fact advertised on the same card. We mentioned Audrina to our mother but she didn’t want a spirit medium hanging about at our house doing laundry. We didn’t know what a medium actually was – my sister thought a prostitute but I thought something to do with ghosts. I strongly suspected I was right – our mother wouldn’t have minded a prostitute hanging about doing laundry.

Anyway, our mother said we should just try to pull together as a team and, if the worst came to the absolute worst, we’d have to go to the Three Sisters in Malby and buy some new T-shirts and pants. We should have told her then about the water-damaged rug and Indian boxes – to indicate the worst had already come. But we didn’t, thinking what’s the point of going on tranquillizers to cheer yourself up if your daughters keep delivering really sad news? So we let sleeping dogs lie.

With all this in mind my sister wrote to Mrs Lunt.

Dear Mrs Lunt,

You are so right – petrol has shot up in price. Some say it will soon be ten bob a gallon in old money. But we are finding it difficult to keep up with all the laundry and housework here. It would be an enormous help if you would reconsider your decision to leave and actually start coming again. You don’t have to come every day, just two or three longer days would probably be enough and use less petrol than coming every day.

The thing is, Mrs Lunt, I am temperamentally unsuited for housework (and it turns out so are the girls) whereas you are 100 per cent suited. Plus it’s imperative to have it done, especially the laundry which has piled up like Mount Sorrel.

 

Please telephone Lizzie or myself if it’s ‘yes’, otherwise just forget I ever wrote.

 

I hope you are well.

 

Yours truly,

Elizabeth Vogel (Mrs)

Mrs Lunt didn’t telephone and the house got more and more messy. Also, no nanny would come to live with us in the village either, even though they’d have had their own bathroom, a little telly, the use of a Mercedes and a minimum of two ponies to choose from. The nanny agency sent two candidates in taxis to view us but both hated the idea of having to drive the Mercedes such a long and windy way into town for a film or a new bra, and they didn’t even ask our mother what the salary was (and that said it all).

After all those years cooped up with amber-eyed Moira and her predecessors, it was nice to be free to go where we wanted on our own and not have to do what the nanny wanted us to do, such as play endless games of Who Am I? and drink Nesquik. Though it did occur to us that a nanny might have usefully contributed to the laundry effort.

We wandered freely around the village and peeped into car windows to see if any dogs had been left inside. We chucked hard apples into the pond, sat in the pear trees and visited fierce-looking bulls, and we looked for Debbie, our dog, who kept running away. Not
away
away, but just enjoying the freedom of no one shutting the gate.

My sister and I started going to London on our own on the train, with a bit of cash and a
Whizzer and Chips
for me, and whatever book my sister was reading at the time. Ruby Ferguson or Gerald Durrell.

Our trips to London began because although our mother was happy with the pills overall, she soon realized she couldn’t get quite enough to keep up with her feelings of loneliness and misery. And she’d started taking slightly more than the stated dose. Plus she needed a different kind in addition, to help give her that bit more vim. Dr Kaufmann would not prescribe any more pills, however eloquent and reasonable our mother’s requests for more. It would have been wrong.

So much for my sister’s worry that they might make her feel ‘too better’ – they soon weren’t making her feel better enough. ‘It’s like having over-diluted Ribena,’ our mother explained. ‘It’s almost worse than having no Ribena at all.’

And we knew exactly what she was talking about.

In order to get more pills, our mother had to go to London to get topped up by a doctor who turned a blind eye. This was OK for a while, but soon she got sick of going all that way and once had a breakdown (in her car) halfway home and had to call our father’s chauffeur, Bernard, and he’d given her snooty looks in the rear-view mirror all the way home, and later our father had rung and accused her of upsetting Bernard and giving him snooty looks and said she needn’t think she could cadge a lift again.

Anyway, that incident put the tin lid on the London trips and she got herself into a panic about getting enough pills – thinking she might have to hang around outside a library in the dark or something horrible and do a deal.

My sister wondered if our mother might take on Audrina, the available help who was also a medium, to go and hang around outside a library once she’d done the laundry but our mother was against this idea. It being her belief that you should only break the law yourself and not get others to do it for you.

So my sister and I told her we were more than happy to go to London for her. I amended it quickly to ‘happy to go’ (thinking that being ‘more than happy’ might be the same as being ‘more than welcome’ – i.e., not). She was very grateful for the offer but said we were far too young to be going to get pills in London on our own.

The train was inky blue with a yellow nose. I’d been expecting it to roar into the station and screech to a halt like a car might, but it didn’t. It rolled in ever so slowly with a face like a sad puppy and little wipers on the two side windows blinking. It had come from Sheffield and wasn’t going to remain for long in the station, so we had to jump aboard quickly and get settled in our seats. I loved it. The tickets, the station, the smell, the noises, the mysterious other people, the lurching rhythms of the forward motion and the tiny little toilet. We bought ourselves tea and toast from the buffet car and actually would both have liked our tea a bit less milky, but you can’t have everything, and the toast was utterly perfect: darkly grilled, buttered to the edges and sweating in its napkin.

London was approximately two hours away and Dr Gilbey’s rooms were on Devonshire Place – a short taxi ride from St Pancras station. On our first trip, my sister decided to take a detour
via London zoo. She’d planned it all along but she dropped it on me as a surprise as we waited in the taxi rank.

‘Shall we go to London zoo?’ she said.

‘I don’t think so, we don’t have time,’ I replied.

‘We do,’ she said. ‘We don’t need to be at Devonshire Place for two and a half hours.’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

‘Well, I’m going to the zoo,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you at Devonshire Place later.’ And of course that was that. I mean, you don’t just walk round London on your own when you’re ten and you don’t even know the place.

I honestly don’t remember much about the zoo that first time, except Chi Chi the giant panda. There was a long notice on an information board about Chi Chi. We read that Chi Chi displayed all the symptoms of chronic loneliness, and yet had confounded bear-breeding experts when she refused to mate with the only available male, An An, who’d been brought over all the way from Moscow zoo in a crate especially for that purpose.

And my sister had said, ‘Hey, just like Mum and Mr Lomax.’ And we’d laughed.

Mainly I remember that my sister loved being at the zoo and was utterly captivated by certain young animals and seemed to want to gaze at them for ever.

And when it was time to leave the zoo and go to Devonshire Place, she complained that we’d not seen half of it and begged for another ten minutes which turned into twenty and then, when we did finally leave, lots of other people wanted to leave too and there was a very long line at the taxi rank. I suggested that I pretend to be very ill and ask to jump the queue to get to a hospital. But my sister is less deceitful than me. We did ask to go to the front, our reason being that we needed to get to
Devonshire Place to get our mother’s pills. No one felt it a good enough reason to let us jump in and everyone ignored us, looking away and pretending to chat, but looking at us again when we turned away. We stood at the end feeling foolish. It was just like being back in the village.

We decided it would be quicker (and less embarrassing) to walk, so we did and we ended up lost and then very late. When we finally arrived at Devonshire Place the enormous shiny door was shut and didn’t have a real knocker, only an ornamental knob bang in the middle. My sister rang the bell and rang and rang. I looked around.

The street – or should I say the ‘place’, since it was a place, not a street – was a row of very tall terraced houses each with its own identical set of black-painted railings, the same set of windows (smaller and less impressive the higher you went up, so that the top windows were just rectangles of grubby glass), the same large black front door and door furniture. The houses were identical except for one, halfway along the terrace, whose paint was beginning to peel and whose window box contained browning geraniums, petals from which were dropping into the cracked paint and bleeding their browny-red juice into the cream, making it all unkempt and messy.

Dr Gilbey’s, like the rest, was pristine. Its window boxes festooned with tiny lime green spheres and frondy leaves in different shades trailing – but tidily – onto the hard deep ledge. I felt sorry for the odd one with its geraniums, its neglect highlit by the uniform smartness of the rest. But thanked God it wasn’t Dr Gilbey’s. That would have been awful.

My sister pressed the bell again and then held her finger there until a woman put her golden head out of an upstairs window.

‘We’ve come to see Dr Gilbey. We’re late, we got lost, but we’re here now,’ my sister shouted.

‘The consulting rooms are closed, I’m afraid,’ the woman called.

‘But we’ve come from Leicester on the train, all the way, just to get our mother’s pills,’ my sister shouted up.

‘Dr Gilbey can’t see anyone now, you’ll have to make another appointment,’ the woman shouted back.

‘Please, can you ask him to just chuck the pills down to us. We can’t go home without them, she’s had a terrible time, she’s split up with our father and everyone in the village hates us and the doctor in the village won’t give her any more pills, please, please.’

I decided (judging by the look on the woman’s face) we were getting somewhere with the pleading, so I joined in.

‘Please,
pleeease
, this is the only doctor in England who will give her any pills,’ I called up, and for some reason I burst into tears and stayed looking up. Even my sister was shocked and looked round at me as if I’d made a terrible mistake.

But the door buzzed and as we walked through the inner door the woman was trotting down the pretty stairs, her golden hair immobile. She ushered us into a white waiting room and established our identity.

‘Wait here, girls,’ she said, and paused in the doorway to ask, ‘Can I get you a glass of orange squash?’

‘No, thanks,’ said my sister, at exactly the same time as my ‘Yes, please.’

She came back with one tall glass of squash on a tray and a bulging paper bag. My sister handed over our money envelope and took the bulging bag.

‘We went to the zoo by accident,’ I blurted.

‘By accident?’ said the woman, smiling.

‘Well, we went there deliberately but stayed too long by accident,’ explained my sister.

‘Don’t you have a zoo in Leicester?’ she asked.

‘Well, there’s Twycross zoo, which is very good, but it’s right over the other side of the county,’ I said, ‘and we wouldn’t get over there.’

‘Added to which, London zoo is world-renowned,’ said my sister, who always had such wonderful things to say.

‘Yes, it is,’ said the woman.

‘But Twycross zoo has the PG Tips chimps,’ I said.

‘Ah, that’s where they’re from,’ said the woman.

‘Yes. They’re real chimps,’ I said, proudly.

And then we were back out on the street with our package and we hailed a taxi to St Pancras station and got on the five o’clock Sheffield-bound train with a hundred other people who mostly got off along the way. I’d left my
Whizzer and Chips
down the side of my seat on the outward journey, thinking, stupidly, we’d be returning in the same seats. To be fair, though, on boarding for the return journey I realized my mistake straight away and didn’t show myself up by looking for it.

‘Don’t tell about the zoo,’ my sister reminded me at Kettering.

I’d bought a tiny giant panda for Little Jack from the gift shop with ‘From London Zoo’ printed at the base in gold.

‘Can’t we just tell Little Jack?’ I asked.

‘God, no, he’s the last person to tell. He’ll make a mountain out of it one way or another and his teacher will be round worrying Mum – just keep your mouth shut.’

I was one of those people (still am) for whom doing a thing was all about the telling. What was the point of going to a world-renowned zoo if you couldn’t tell people you’d been to it? If you couldn’t mention that Chi Chi the giant panda hadn’t been allowed into the United States due to her being a Communist panda. That she’d ended up in London and had refused
to mate with the available male even though she was lonely and had a centrally heated enclosure. Because all she wanted was to be back at home in China eating bamboo and mating with another Communist panda.

What was the point?

My sister and I were (are) very different in that respect. For her, it was the being there and the seeing the rare, exotic and dangerous animals, and once we came away it was over with and packed away with her other thrilling memories. Whereas I don’t want to be thrilled unless I’m allowed to tell the story of it.

When my sister and I phoned from the coin-box at the railway station to say we were back in Leicester, our mother was very pleased to hear from us. We’d been longer than she had expected and she had got it into her head that we’d run away like her second cousin, Margot Fenton-Hall, who’d gone to London aged fourteen in 1950-something to be measured for ballet shoes at Frederick Freed’s and had never come back – only sent a note to her parents saying, ‘I’m not coming home, don’t look for me.’ She hadn’t even been to Frederick Freed’s for the shoes and wasn’t seen again by her parents until she appeared on telly years later playing a motel secretary in a soap opera. Our mother’s aunt and uncle wrote to Margot (now with a new name), care of the programme, begging her to get in touch but she never did and they had to endure seeing their daughter on the telly every week on a dreadful programme that they hated – and not even on the BBC – which was vexing. But they couldn’t bear not to watch. Our mother doubted the actress playing the secretary actually was the second cousin. Which was much sadder than it actually being her, I thought.

Our mother was glad to have us back from London anyway, and relieved that we weren’t going to end up on ATV, which she
thought would be a wrong career choice for both of us. She always imagined my sister would become a vet – if she could just overcome her fear of science experiments – and that I would be a teacher or a writer. She had no idea what Little Jack might become but felt sure it would be something ‘extremely important’. That’s what she said but Jack probably didn’t believe she really thought that. I didn’t.