Death of a Perfect Mother Page 4

  ‘They’re nothing like,’ said Ann shortly.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean in the face, or anything, just in their natures. Though I will say this, though I shouldn’t as his mum, but you wouldn’t find a better-looking, better setup chap than my Gordon.’ The voice became more insistent. ‘Would you?’

  ‘I really can’t say I’ve thought about it.’

  ‘Go on. Don’t tell me. You’ve thought about it all right. I know what it’s like when you’re young. What are you? Twenty-four? Twenty-five?’ Lill’s leer split her face in two, a great cracked doll’s face, surmounted by a shrieking red mop. ‘I know what it’s like being twenty-five, widow or no widow. Now, your David was a nice-looking chap, I’m sure, and one in a million, but he wasn’t the only fish in the sea and why should you pretend he was? He’s been gone two years and more now. And there’s things that a girl like you needs at your age—’

  ‘Do you mind—?’

  ‘And there’s my Gordon, he’s really got an eye for you. You’d go lovely together, I know it. I can just see you, together. You might be made for each other. Go on—admit it: you wouldn’t say no to a bit of you-know-what now and again, would you? No girl ought to be ashamed of that. Wouldn’t my Gordon just suit you down to the ground, eh?’

  Ann Watson faced her across the kitchen table, and Lill’s evil old face suddenly touched a nerve which made her control snap as it never had since the day her husband had died: ‘You disgusting old bag,’ she shrieked, red in the face. ‘You’re pimping for your own son.’

  ‘Words!’ said Lill, momentarily disconcerted and retreating towards the door, clutching her sugar bowl. ‘I wouldn’t have expected words like that from a girl of your education. That’s what comes of trying to do a bit of good in the world. I only wanted to help you, because I saw you needed it. All I want’s for you both to be comfortable.’

  ‘Get out of my house, you old harridan,’ yelled Ann, and as Lill turned tail and started down the step she marched over and slammed the door brutally on her retreating ankle. Then she tottered over to the kitchen table and sat down, clutching the legs of it until her knuckles were white, racked by violent, silent sobs that would not come out in tears.

  Limping down the road, having enjoyed herself hugely, Lill nevertheless thought to herself: I don’t think she’d do for my Gordon, after all. He’d never want to get hitched to a girl with a temper like that.

  CHAPTER 4

  A BIT ON THE SIDE

  Lill Hodsden’s colour television—a large, poor-quality model, out of which salmon-pink announcers gaped at her as from a fish-bowl, dressed in shiny turquoise suits unbecoming their age and dignity—was in fact a present from a friend, though for form’s sake, and because she liked lying when it could give her a delicious sense of romantic intrigue, she had invented the family emigrating to foreign parts. It was a present she had been grateful for at the time (‘Oh, it’s ever so much prettier,’ she had said, and indeed she had sat for hour after hour gazing at washy-blue hills alive with the sound of music), but the first fine bloom of gratitude had by now worn off, hardly at all prolonged by the occasional gift of cash. She was beginning to wonder whether the time wasn’t ripe for another more substantial tribute. She’d have to start hinting, very delicately, to Mr Corby.

  It was a Corby evening tonight, Monday. Lill always gave her boys—and inevitably her family—a cooked tea. She prided herself on it. When Brian and Debbie had got back from school by bus about five, and when Gordon and Fred had separately cycled home from work, she served them all toasted cheese and Beefomite, an invention of her own she was very proud of, though Woman’s Home had surprisingly failed to print the recipe when she submitted it for their Tastisnax page. Debbie ate only one little triangle, then went out and got a lump of cheese from the ’fridge and ostentatiously nibbled it, heedless of Lill’s cold, hard stares. The rest of them had got used to it, and managed to get it down.

  ‘Champion,’ said Fred, licking his lips.

  By seven-fifteen Lill had smoked two fags cadged from Gordon, washed up the tea things (‘By rights I ought to have a machine, with a family this size’) and listened to The Archers (‘That Shula’s a right little madam, just like my Debbie’). At twenty past seven she took down her leopard-skin coat from the hook in the hall, fixed a perky green hat on her scarlet mop, and poked her head round the front-room door:

  ‘I’m just going round to sit with Mrs Corby for an hour or two,’ she called.

  ‘Right you are,’ said Fred, breaking out of a doze.

  Debbie was upstairs in the much-discussed bedroom, Brian was in the back room doing a history essay for the morning on Benthamism and nineteenth-century industrial legislation, and Gordon was upstairs changing into his track suit preparatory to going jogging. To all of them Lill shrilled blithely ‘Won’t be gone long!’, and then clip-clopped out into Windsor Avenue with a silly complacent smile on her face which gave her away to the merest cat, sunning itself on the garden wall.

  Mrs Corby was an invalid who for five years now had kept to her room, laid low by an indefinable illness that doctors in the last century would probably have labelled ‘nervous prostration’. Now and again in summer her husband, with the help of a neighbour, bundled her into the car, wrapped up like an oversized and querulous baby, and took her for a drive to Portsea along the coast, or inland to some of the beauty spots and picturesque villages of South-West England, at all of which Mrs Corby glared malevolently, as if this was what she was glad to have got away from. This was her only contact with civilization at large. She had a nature ill-adapted to friendship, being a thoroughly nasty woman with a vinegar-soaked tongue and a need to cut everybody within sight down to half her own size, so she had no visitors. She saw her husband, the doctor, and the twice-weekly char. She had never in her life, certainly, spoken to Lill Hodsden, for in Todmarsh, as elsewhere, there were circles within circles, and Drusilla Corby was on the inner, and Lill Hodsden the outer line. By now this was irrelevant. For Lill she was just an excuse, a convenience, a lie that could not be checked up on. W. Hamilton Corby had once described her to Lill as a legal fiction, and Lill, thinking he’d said friction, had snarled: ‘Christ, she’s that all right.’

  She let herself into the large, weather-mellowed, red-brick house, with the feeble pretence of battlements and turret windows, and went straight through the hall to the study at the back. Finding nobody there, she opened the bar-cupboard in the far corner (rosewood lined with pink silk—Corby had had it made specially) and mixed herself a gin and tonic. Holding her glass in a sophisticated manner, imagining herself to be Princess Grace at a diplomatic reception in Monaco, she went over to the desk and casually went through the correspondence there. Then she remembered to take off her parody leopard-skin, threw it over the desk chair, and settled herself on the leather-covered sofa, fingering it meditatively and pricing it in her mind. It wouldn’t have been her choice, but the cost of it excited her. When finally Hamilton Corby came into the room, muttering ‘She’s a bit troublesome tonight,’ Lill drained her glass, waited till he had safely closed the door, then cackled and said: ‘When isn’t she?’

  W. Hamilton Corby (born Wilf Corby, he had taken in his wife’s surname when she had made him the happiest man in Todmarsh, and one of the wealthier) was not a romantic figure, looked at objectively. The impression one took away was of sagging tummy, baggy trousers, and watery, shifty eyes. He was the sort of man one sees in droves at the better sort of main-road pubs, boasting about their deals by the bar with their sagging, baggy, shifty fellows, or sitting silent at tables with their wives. No, beyond his income he scored few points as a lover, and more often than not all he wanted on Lill’s visits was a befuddled fumble. More’s the pity, as Lill often said to herself.

  ‘She’s a poor creature,’ said Corby, settling himself on the sofa and putting his hand absent-mindedly on Lill’s knee, apparently because it was there. He went through, as if by rote, the litany of phrases he always used about
his wife. ‘She’s her own worst enemy. She makes no one unhappy but herself. I don’t know what she’d do without me. Because I can tell you this: she’d never get anyone else to stop with her, pay them what she might. She’s the sort nobody can help because she won’t help herself.’

  Lill sat complacently through this, the terms of which were as well known to her as a weather forecast. When he came to a stop the hand went further up her thigh. Lill would have liked another gin and tonic, but she thought he might as well do whatever he wanted to do or was capable of doing, and then they could be comfy. Five minutes later she got her gin.

  ‘Business booming?’ she asked, sipping. It was one of her four conversational openings.

  Hamilton Corby grunted. ‘Not bad. Could be worse. Thank God we’re a small firm, making small boats people can still afford. If we’d built liners or tankers we’d have been in the hands of the receiver long ago. Or taken over by Wedgie Benn.’

  ‘How’s my Gordon doing? All right?’

  Corby grunted again. ‘All right. He’s a good worker. Not that there’s much for him to do. I only took him on to oblige, as you know. But he pulls his weight . . . Shouldn’t have thought it was really his line, though.’

  Lill preened herself and put on her Lady Muck face. ‘Well, of course he should really be doing something far better, something with lots more class. He’s a boy with tremendous potential.’ She relaxed a little, and immediately collapsed into bathos: ‘I’ve always thought my Gordon ought to be in films.’

  Hamilton Corby said nothing. The last time he’d been to the cinema had been in the Anna Neagle-Michael Wilding era. Gordon didn’t remind him all that much of Michael Wilding.

  ‘He’s got the looks,’ continued Lill, looking dreamily ahead over her glass of gin. ‘That nobody could deny. A real smasher. And he’s got something else . . . A sort of dangerous quality.’

  Corby did not consider that last statement as seriously as he might. ‘Can he act?’ he asked nastily.

  ‘He used to do marvellous imitations as a child,’ rejoined Lill, unperturbed. ‘Killing he was, had us all in stitches. They’re both very talented, my boys.’

  ‘He strikes me more as the sporty type,’ said Corby, who genuinely liked Gordon. ‘Should have gone to college, become a P.E. teacher or something.’

  ‘Well, of course that’s what I wanted,’ said Lill, hearing the notion for the first time. ‘It would have suited him down to the ground. But no, it had to be the army. He would go. Christ, when I think of that Mrs Watson’s hubby, dead at twenty-four, I get the cold shivers. Thank God my Gordon got out.’ She suddenly thought of something and cackled. ‘They both got out in a way, eh?’

  She quietened down after a bit, when Hamilton Corby merely contemplated his whisky glass mournfully. ‘Oh dear, aren’t I awful? Anyway, as I was saying, Gordon’s not really got as far as he ought to have done. That’s why I want him to have a car.’

  The remarkable logical leap from vocational heights to physical distances did not escape Hamilton Corby. He declined to leap at once in the required direction. He said: ‘Plenty of cars around.’

  ‘Of course, I meant a sort of family car,’ said Lill. ‘Only Gordon could drive it. Brian too when he’s a bit older, because there’s nothing unmechanical about him, for all his brains . . .’ She paused for a little, and then added meaningfully: ‘You’ve got more money than you know what to do with.’

  ‘Nobody’s got more money than they know what to do with,’ replied Corby, with intense conviction.

  ‘Oh, go on. You wouldn’t even notice a sum like that,’ said Lill, nudging him encouragingly. Hamilton Corby was not stupid: he may have got where he was (and paid for it) by marriage, but he had kept there by a modicum of sharpness. He had several ways of not getting caught by the likes of Lill.

  ‘My brother-in-law’s got an old Mini,’ he said eventually; ‘belongs to his wife, but she never uses it. He’s thinking of selling it.’

  ‘That wasn’t the kind of car I was thinking about,’ said Lill.

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’ And Hamilton Corby smiled a sly, aqueous smile and held his peace. Lill thought she’d let the subject drop for a moment, and the two turned to other things.

  ‘Hey, I had the chance of a lifetime last week,’ she said eventually, as the hands of the clock neared nine-thirty. Her fat, coarse face had brightened at the very thought.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Guy Fawcett next door. Made what you might call an indecent suggestion.’

  ‘Oh? What was that?’

  ‘What do you mean what was that? What do you think it was? Wanted to go to bed with me, that’s what. He’s often home during the day, and his wife’s out at work. And of course, none of my lot’s home during the day.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Called him a dirty old man and said he ought to be ashamed. Doesn’t do to jump at it first time.’ She cast a sideways glance at Hamilton Corby, sagging apathetically on the sofa beside her, and said: ‘Not that he is old, not by a long chalk. About forty-five, I’d say. Not much older than me . . . Got a good job, too . . . He’s a car salesman.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better go to him for your car,’ said Corby, with unexpected quickness of mind. As a ploy for arousing jealousy, Guy Fawcett’s indecent proposal seemed less than a total success. She began collecting herself together.

  ‘Of course, he’s a very attractive man,’ she said, persistent. ‘Tremendous shoulders. And what I’d call a really sensitive face. You never know when you’ll get that sort of proposition again . . .’ She shook her head meaningfully.

  ‘See you Thursday, Lill?’

  ‘Shouldn’t wonder. Same time.’ At the study door she gave him a tremendous passionate kiss five seconds long, and after tiptoeing through the hall another at the front door.

  ‘Don’t you worry about Fawcett,’ she whispered, as if he had; ‘I can put him in his place any time.’

  ‘Don’t take any nonsense from him, Lill,’ said Corby, playing along.

  ‘Not more than I want to. Keep your pecker up. It can’t last for ever, you know. If she was gone, I’d marry you like a shot.’

  Hamilton Corby, who knew he could do very much better if marriage were in question, said: ‘What about Fred?’

  ‘Oh, I’d soon get rid of Fred,’ returned Lill, her whisper more urgent. ‘Never you mind how. Ta-ta for now.’

  Above them on the first floor a door closed. On the step, taking a last genteel peck, they heard nothing. Then Lill set off at her usual brisk pace down Balaclava Road and turned into the enveloping shadows of Snoggers Alley. She was not altogether satisfied with her evening, but still, a seed had been planted. And if the worst came to the worst, a Mini would be better than nothing. So when she got home, at nine-forty prompt, she was quite her normal cheery self.

  ‘That’s my good turn for the day done!’

  ‘How was she?’ asked Fred, who was in the same half-asleep state he had been in when she went out, this time in front of a TV Western.

  Lill shook her head gloomily. ‘It’s a terrible disease. She’s in purgery the whole time. The doctors can’t even put a name to it.’

  Fred nodded. He never showed any greater curiosity than this about her twice-weekly visits. His store of curiosity was tiny at the best of times. The rest of the family, sprawled around the television in various attitudes of inattention, kept tactfully silent.

  ‘Do you know,’ said Lill, who could never keep quiet about anything that was on her mind. ‘I think it’s time we bought a car.’ Gordon looked at Brian and Brian looked at Gordon, but neither of them said anything. Debbie sniffed and left the room. ‘We’d’ve had one years ago if it hadn’t been for buying Gordon out of the army. I think I know where we could pick one up dirt cheap. I’ve always said, it’s what you boys need. Get you out so’s you can have a good time. Meet a few girls.’

  ‘I thought I was supposed to be marked down for Mrs Watson,’ said Gordon. �
�I don’t need a car to go courting her—she just lives up the road.’

  ‘Mrs Watson! That stuck-up little tailor’s dummy! Christ! Whatever gave you that idea? You’re a sight too good to take up with other men’s leavings.’

  Lill always let her family know when she changed her mind.

  • • •

  ‘She’s screwing a car out of him now,’ said Gordon to Brian, when at last they had escaped from rusks and Ovalmix and had reached the womblike safety of their bedroom. ‘God, what a cheek she’s got!’

  ‘Would you have the nerve to drive round in a car that was the price of your mother’s shame?’ demanded Brian with a melodramatic gesture of the arms.

  ‘Frankly, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. Only I don’t think I’ll be getting the chance. Lill’s next ride is going to be in the back of a hearse.’

  Brian shivered when it was put that bluntly. ‘Funny to think about it. Free, after all these years of . . . of being her doormats. I wish I felt better.’

  Gordon looked at him keenly. ‘What do you mean, better? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Just this ruddy cough. It’s the climate. “Bronchial isle, all isles excelling”, as the poet said. They shouldn’t have put people down in this climate.’

  ‘It’s not the climate does things to you. It’s Lill. It’s just some nervous thing. Remember last year—you weren’t any better in Tunisia.’

  Brian, lying on his bed with an unread book, shifted uneasily at the mention of Tunisia, as he always did. ‘Christ, no wonder I didn’t feel up to much,’ he muttered. ‘What with Lill and all. Remember Lill on the plane?’

  The two heads on their pillows—Gordon’s dark and purposeful, Brian’s fair and distressed—lay for a moment in silence as last year’s holiday in Tunisia came back to them. It had been explained to Lill that the firm they were travelling with was ‘up market’, and, when she expressed bewilderment, the term had been spelled out in words of one syllable. But she never quite understood that the people on this trip were a different sort from the mob they had been with to Benidorm three years before. Just in those early moments, when everyone was settling into their seats, swapping with each other at most a murmured comment on the rate of exchange or the price of Glenfiddich, Lill showed she misjudged the prevailing mood by shrieking across the plane to Gordon, six rows in front: ‘Soon be there now, Gord! How long will it be, d’you think, before some sheikh snatches me up in his passionate arms and takes me off to his harem, eh?’ And as soon as the ‘Fasten Seat Belts’ sign was switched off she was swaying along the aisle to the loo singing ‘The Sheikh of Arabee-ee’ with special smiles at all the more desirably distinguished men on the trip. One frozen air hostess at the back of the plane raised a plucked eyebrow at the other frozen air hostess at the front; the up-market travellers glanced sideways at each other and coughed in the backs of their throats. Still over the Channel, and everyone had got Lill’s number. None of them exchanged a word with Lill for the rest of the fortnight. ‘They’re a stuffy lot,’ Lill kept saying. ‘I prefer the wogs. Don’t understand what they’re going on about, but at least they’re friendly.’