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  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1: Mother and Sons

  Chapter 2: Family Night Out

  Chapter 3: Gingering Things Up

  Chapter 4: A Bit On the Side

  Chapter 5: Tuesday

  Chapter 6: Colour Sense

  Chapter 7: Thursday

  Chapter 8: The Morning After

  Chapter 9: Old Fred

  Chapter 10: Half Truths

  Chapter 11: Brian and Debbie

  Chapter 12: Friends and Neighbours

  Chapter 13: Fred and Family

  Chapter 14: The Twa Corbies

  Chapter 15: Trouble at the Hodsdens’

  Chapter 16: Confession

  Chapter 17: Happy Ending

  The lines from ‘Lily the Pink’ in Chapter 2 are quoted by permission of

  the Noel Gay Music Company Ltd

  CHAPTER 1

  MOTHER AND SONS

  Clip-clop down Carnation Road on her way to the shops went Lillian Hodsden, in the last week of her mortal life.

  ‘Hello, Mr Davies. How’s the lumbago? Better? Bet you’re glad Spring is here, eh? That’ll buck you up.’

  Mr Davies, tottering home in the opposite direction, let out an ambiguous grunt intended to signify that, thank you for asking, it was no better, and in his opinion Spring was not here, nor even on its way. But he needn’t have bothered even with that minimal response. Lillian Hodsden had clomped past him, oblivious, her eye fixed on the next recipient of her early morning cheeriness.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Wharton. Lovely day. Saw you’d got your daughter down. That’s nice. And the kiddies? Oh, lovely. Give them a kiss from me, won’t you?’

  At the mention of the grandchildren Mrs Wharton had shown signs of wanting to stop, but Lillian Hodsden would have nothing of it: having no grandchildren herself, thank God, she was unable to bore back in kind, so she shrilled: ‘Can’t stop. Got all the weekend shopping to do. Can’t think where the weekdays go to, can you?’ and she cantered ahead, leaving Mrs Wharton with vague feelings of rebellious irritation, for she was a widow lady who found her time, minute by minute of it, all too easy to account for. She looked round, eyes narrowed, at the diminishing form of Lillian Hodsden.

  It wasn’t a form you’d mistake easily. Lill was forty-eight but it needed no more than a dash of generosity to suggest forty-two. Buttoned tight round her chunky, bullet-breasted body was a leopard-skin coat, skimpy in proportions but flagrant in falsity. On her feet were a pair of cheap sandals, shiny black edged with gold braid, with heavy wooden heels that made rhythmic patterns on the stony tarmac, announcing her coming as surely as if she were Carmen practising with her castanets in the wings. Crowning the whole effect—and no one could deny that she did make an effect—was a mop of copper-red hair, blatantly untrue to nature, and looking as if she had just dipped her head in a sink full of bull’s blood.

  You noticed Lill Hodsden, people said in Todmarsh.

  Lill was not a native of the undistinguished little southwestern seaside town where she had made her home. She had come here from Leicester in the early ’fifties, the years when Tory freedom was giving people vague yearnings: sniffing the air they smelt money, undreamed-of comforts, the chance of a quick financial kill. It was a time for mobility, geographical and social. Lill Hodsden had her eyes on both. We weren’t good enough for her, her neighbours in the Midlands said when she left, and once she’d gone back to tell them they were right.

  So she—and incidentally a husband, and incidentally a baby boy—had migrated to the South in search of richer pastures: a classier-sounding address; a nicer type of neighbour; schools with better names and more impressive uniforms. She never asked whether she would be accepted, any more than she listened to the replies to her casually flung cheerinesses. She was Lill, and good as the next woman. Over the years she had acquired two more children, and brought her mother down to live next door, but otherwise than that she did not change. Her neighbours it was who finally had to swallow the outrageously sugared pill. She had settled in this dull little town like a bird of exotic (albeit artificial) colouring alighting on a hen-coop. Finally the hens had had to treat her as one of themselves, though they never ceased to look bewilderedly at the plumage.

  Her early morning shopping, today and every day, was a royal progress from butcher’s to grocer’s, from grocer’s to greengrocer’s. Everywhere she was known. Everywhere she had her standard little jokes and greetings. Everywhere, she was sure, she was loved. For Lill Hodsden was quite unconscious of the possibility that she made any impression other than the one she intended. ‘Quite a character, our Lill,’ she’d once heard the greengrocer say. She had taken it as a seventy per cent-proof compliment. She was quite a character. She had a cheery wave for everyone, knew everybody’s history, opinions and little ways, and had the appropriate words of greeting for each one of them.

  ‘They all say I’m a marvel,’ she would tell her family. ‘They don’t know how I do it.’

  So today she clattered from establishment to establishment, exchanging ear-singeing salutations with the other customers, chatting along in her high-speed-drill voice as she waited her turn, chaffing the butcher’s boy or the grocer’s wife with her age-old jokes and meaningless saws when at last she got to the counter.

  ‘Mind you give us a good bit, Bert,’ she shrilled to the butcher, gazing with ignorant vagueness down at the offered choice (for she could no more tell a good piece of meat from a bad one than she could tell a sparrow from a chaffinch). ‘It’s my Gordon’s birthday Sunday, and he does like a good joint. None of your fatty bits, now.’

  ‘Not on your life, Lill,’ said Bert, with the forced grin that many faces assumed when confronted by Lillian Hodsden. ‘More than my life’s worth. I wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Nor I don’t believe you would,’ said Lill, with a cackle of self-approbation. ‘I’ve got him where I want him, eh?’ and she turned to her audience to exact homage.

  The newsagent was the recipient of her lengthiest confidences. She dropped in at the end of her tour, her shopping baskets laden with meat and groceries, vegetables and out-of-season fruit, plonked them down on the floor, picked up Weekend and TV News, and proceeded to take over the shop.

  ‘Isn’t it a lovely day? They laid it on just for me, you know. They like me up there. It’s my Gordon’s birthday tomorrow. I’m going to do him proud. Here, have you got a big box of chocks? Something real swank? Let’s have a look, then.’

  She grabbed the proffered boxes—large and plush, large and garish—in her pudgy hands and carefully picked the most expensive. (Where does she get the money from? thought the newsagent—a rhetorical thought if ever there was one, for he had a very good idea.)

  ‘Nothing but the best, eh?’ resumed Lill, slapping down the money. ‘You’re not twenty-six every day of the week!’

  ‘What’s your Gordon doing now?’ asked the newsagent, without any great curiosity.

  ‘At this moment I’d guess he’s lying in bed,’ said Lill, with her parrotty laugh. ‘That’s where they were when I come out, both the boys. I shouted up to them, I said: “You be out of there before I come back, or you’ll feel my hand on your b.t.m’s!” Oh, we do have a laugh, me and the boys. They’re lovely lads, both of them.’ She opened the door into the watery sunshine, a South of England apology for a fine day. ‘We think t
he world of each other,’ she said. ‘They’d do anything for me.’

  • • •

  ‘She’ll have to be got rid of,’ said Gordon Hodsden, lying on his frowsty bed, puffing at a cigarillo and looking up at the ceiling. ‘Some way or other, she’s got to be put down.’

  His brother Brian, lying on the bed by the opposite wall, turned his book on to its face on the bedside table and said: ‘What do you think she’s saying at this moment?’ His voice took on the authentic parakeet shrillness: ‘ “Have you got a nice plump chicken for Sunday dinner, Bert? Mind it’s a good one, because—” ’

  Here Gordon joined in the chorus: ‘ “— my Gordon he does like a nice bit o’ breast!” ’

  The bedroom rocked as they both shrilled a motherly squawk of laughter.

  ‘ “You’ve gotta laugh, haven’t you?” ’ resumed Brian, unable to give up the routine. ‘ “Makes the world go round, a bit of laughter, I always say. We have some good laughs, me and the boys.” ’ He lowered his voice to a confidential pitch that was somehow just as false and unpleasant: ‘ “But they’re lovely boys, both of them. They think the world of me. Worship the ground I walk on. They’d do anything for me, they would, my Gordon and Brian.” ’

  ‘The question is, what shall we do for her, or rather to her?’ said Gordon, lying back on the bed, his brown cigarillo pointing upwards to the ceiling, wreathing himself in smoke. ‘Or, to put it bluntly, how are we going to do her in?’

  Brian too lay back on his bed in rapt, companionable contemplation, though the close observer might have noticed the tiny furrow on his young forehead, the trouble in his blue eyes. Physically there was no great likeness between Lill’s two boys. Gordon was tall and chunky, with a mop of dark hair, and working-man’s shoulders and hands. His face was good-looking enough, but restless and instinct with a half-understood aggression. He had had five years in the army, had bought himself out with Lill’s help, and was now working at the local shipyard—and the fact that she felt this was not ‘good’ enough for him was one reason why his mother had not answered the newsagent’s enquiry as to what he was doing now.

  His brother Brian was nineteen, so his half-formed look was more understandable. He was slight, fair, and in his pyjamas looked no more than a boy. He too was restless, with the restlessness of feared failure, of chafing against something he knew he was not strong enough to fight. He was aiming, uncertainly, at university. What Gordon and Brian had in common was their manacle and chain. Physically they were as different as chalk and cheese, and Lill would certainly have made jokes about their paternity if she could have done so without impugning their legitimacy. Nothing like that was to be said about either of her boys! On the subject of her daughter she had no such inhibitions.

  ‘The great thing about Mum,’ said Brian eventually, ‘about Lill, sweet songbird of the Midlands, our beloved giver of life—the great thing about her is her regularity.’

  ‘Oh Christ, don’t mention her bowels,’ said Gordon, turning over in his bed in disgust and cursing as his cigarillo stubbed itself out in the pillow.

  ‘Not her bowels, you clot, her habits. Her beastly habits. She generally does everything she does at the same time. Especially of an evening.’

  Gordon, engaged in brushing the ash off his bed, and turning over the pillow, on which a tiny burn-hole had appeared, paused. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Regular as clockwork. Everything according to plan. Down the pub at seven fifteen, back from the pub at nine-thirty. It’s all part of her shattering predictability. It’s one of the things that make her—’

  ‘So utterly loathsome to live with. Agreed. The fact that even when she’s out and you’ve got a bit of rest from her, you keep looking at the clock, knowing that on the dot she’ll breeze in and say: “Yoohoo, I’m home! How’s my boys? Had a lovely evening, have you?” Right you are. Still, it has its uses.’

  ‘When you are planning to do her in,’ said Gordon.

  ‘Right. When you are planning to put an end to an existence that brings joy to none, and irritation, nausea, fear, loathing and actual physical vomiting to thousands.’ Brian rolled the words round his mouth lovingly. Words were his refuge, his secret, solitary defence. The only way he could tolerate Lill being Lill and being his mother was to form the words that described her. He lay on the bed forming more phrases, a thesaurus of hate, while Gordon began his morning liturgy of exercises—press-ups, running on the spot, lithe swoops of the trunk from side to side and violent feints at this and that. Gordon’s regular exercises were a relic of his army days, something he clung to as desperate men do cling to sure things as they sink in oceans of uncertainty. Besides, as he often said, you never knew when training might come in useful.

  ‘Bloody Tarzan,’ said Brian, tired with all the activity. ‘Give over and think.’

  ‘I am thinking,’ said Gordon, back on the floor and pressing himself up and down at double speed with an expert judgment that just stopped him bashing his chin against the floor. ‘This is when I do think.’

  ‘Funny brain you must have,’ said Brian. ‘What’s the result of your thinking?’

  Gordon stopped, swivelled himself round on to his haunches, and sat looking at his brother’s bed, his square shoulders hunched forward urgently.

  ‘Saturday. That’s the result of my thinking. Saturday. One week from today. As she’s coming home from the pub. A sharp blow on the back of the head as she comes through Snoggers Alley. Or maybe a rope round her throat. Are you with me?’

  ‘ ’Course I’m with you.’ Brian lay back against his pillow, his weaker, less intense face wreathed in smiles. ‘What an idea! They’ll think it’s some casual mugger, eh? We’ll take her handbag and keep the small change.’ He drowned in ecstatic anticipation. ‘Wouldn’t it be marvellous?’

  Gordon threw himself forward on to his brother’s bed and shook him by the shoulders: ‘Stupid bastard! It’s not a case of “wouldn’t it”! I’m serious!’

  Brian looked at him, half wondering, half afraid. ‘Serious? You mean you . . . you mean we could?’

  ‘I mean we’ve got to. I mean it’s our only chance. What else is there? I tried, didn’t I—tried to get away. I went into the army, got away for five years. Only it wasn’t away at all. Everywhere I went I had this ball and chain attached, labelled “Lill”. It’ll be the same with you. Why did you fail your Scholarship levels? Because deep down you wanted to. And she wanted you to too. Now there’s no question of Oxford or Cambridge. That would have taken you away from Lill, from old Dracula curls. Now the best you can hope for is South Wessex—twelve miles of good motorway and back home for tea with Lill at five o’clock. Just what she planned for all along.’

  ‘ “They say it’s very good for Socialology,” ’ quoted Brian with a bitter smile.

  ‘You’ll have the ball and chain on, boyo, same as I felt in the army. And it’ll be there as long as she’s alive, and when she dies there’ll be no life left in us because we’ll have been sucked dry. To get rid of that chain we’ve got to snap it off.’

  ‘If only . . .’ said Brian, faltering.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If only there were some other way.’

  ‘There isn’t!’ Gordon towered over him, pumping him full of his own energy. ‘If a getaway was possible I’d have made it. But I came back, and you’ll be stuck here for life. I got the job at the shipyard—and we all know how I got that—and you’ll go to our little neighbourhood university and land a job as a teacher in some local dump. And that’s our lives. All our lives. Lill in the centre of her web, entertaining her flies.’

  ‘You might get married . . . I might too.’

  Gordon’s face darkened. ‘Do you think I haven’t thought about that? In fact that’s . . . But it couldn’t happen while Lill’s alive. Oh, I’ve got girl-friends all right, plenty of them, but anything more than that? I couldn’t. As long as she’s there I couldn’t . . .’

  ‘There’s a book about that—Sons and Lo—’
/>   ‘This isn’t a fucking book! Sod your books! It’s my life! And if I went to . . . her, if I made her want me, what would happen? We set up home in this town, and I’m still mother’s boy. We go away, and I’m on a longer lead, same as in the army. She’s got us, body and soul. She’s owned us, every minute of our lives since the day we were born. If we ever get free, it’ll be violently—it’ll be by doing her in.’ He stared down at his brother. ‘Are you with me?’

  Brian didn’t look up. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about? Answer me.’

  ‘Who is it you want to marry?’

  ‘Ann Watson up the road, if you must know. She hasn’t so much as looked at me. Why should she? Poor old Gordon Hodsden, the big milksop: still tied to his mother’s apron-strings at his age. Before she’ll ever look at me I’ve got to be free. Come on, give me an answer. Are you with me?’

  Brian’s heart seemed to stop still, then to leap exultantly in his slight body. ‘Yes!’ he said. Then he turned to his brother and said ‘Yes, yes, yes!’

  ‘All right then,’ said Gordon. ‘Now we can get down to business.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ muttered Brian, suddenly abstracted again, and pushing a lock of fair hair back from his forehead in worried frustration, ‘that the family’s always suspected first.’

  ‘The husband’s always suspected first,’ said Gordon. ‘Old Fred. Can you see old Fred doing our Lill in? Can you visualize it? He’d have to ask permission first. Anyway, Saturday night’s his night on the town. His night out on parole. Darts at the Yachtsman’s Arms. He’s bound to have twenty people to swear he was down there being the life and soul of the party every minute from eight to ten-thirty.’

  ‘In which case,’ said Brian, ‘they’ll look at us.’

  ‘Why should they? Us? Her beloved boys? We’re one big happy family. The whole town knows that. Lill and her lads. We worship the ground she walks on.’ Gordon came up and sat on Brian’s bed, looking at him closely. ‘You ever told anybody, Bri?’