Death of a Perfect Mother Read online

  She drew her thin lips even tighter around her old teeth, nodded her head and went out in better heart to fry her cod.

  • • •

  ‘Oh, you are a devil,’ said Lill at last. ‘I’d never have thought you had it in you. Quite an education, really. Just like one of those manuals you read about.’

  ‘Quite good, eh?’ agreed Guy Fawcett, relaxing on his back with an expression of sublime conceit on his face. ‘Expect I could teach old Fred a thing or two.’

  Lill sniggered disloyally. ‘Gawd, don’t mention him. I’d better go down and boil his potatoes.’ For some reason Guy sniggered in his turn. ‘Here,’ said Lill, as she struggled out of bed. ‘We ought to do this more often.’

  ‘Come back when you’ve put the spuds on, and we’ll see,’ said Guy in a seigneurial way.

  ‘Didn’t mean that, you clot,’ said Lill. And when she returned and snuggled back against his fleshy frame in bed she said: ‘We could make this a regular thing.’

  ‘Tuesdays and Fridays?’ said Guy. ‘Regular servicing with a stamped receipt? That’s not my line, Lill, not my line at all. I’m not the sort to get fenced in.’

  ‘Why not?’ protested Lill. ‘If you enjoyed yourself . . . ?’

  ‘Oh, I enjoyed it. But I like to play it by ear. Take it as it comes. I’m not a boy that can work regular hours.’

  ‘Well, you’re damned lucky your wife does,’ said Lill with spirit. ‘Wonder what she’d say if I told her.’

  ‘Don’t push your luck, Lill,’ said Guy Fawcett, pressing her shoulders brutally down against the pillows. ‘Or you’ll be riding for a fall.’

  • • •

  ‘Hey, Brian,’ said one of his classmates as they came out of a period on Palmerston’s foreign policy and headed towards the long huts where dinner was served. ‘Some of us are going over to Puddlesham to a disco on Saturday night. Are you coming?’

  ‘Saturday night?’ said Brian, pushing back that troublesome lock of hair from over his eyes. ‘No, Saturday night I’ve got something on.’

  CHAPTER 6

  COLOUR SENSE

  The Coponawi Islands, which Mr Achituko had left for the drizzle and wheeze of an English winter, were dots on the map—courtesy dots at that—in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from civilization, and not much nearer to Queensland. The islanders had undoubtedly been cannibal until the early eighteen-seventies, when they were Christianized by a gaunt, determined missionary, inevitably a Scot, a graduate of Edinburgh and Exeter Hall, a man so feared and respected that at his death—four years after his arrival, and before his flock could readily distinguish between Elijah and Elisha—his body was subjected to no more than the odd reverent nibble.

  His flock’s understanding of their new faith was at that point still wavering and nebulous, but some few could read, and when they discovered among his books (most of them too long and heavy for intellectual comfort) a little volume entitled The Wise and Witty Sayings of George Eliot they modelled their religion around her precepts and (in direct defiance of the good man’s commands, which they easily in their minds reversed) set up wooden idols of the Sage which visiting anthropologists from Scandinavia later mistook for some form of horse worship imported by boat people from prehistoric North Africa.

  Things had progressed rapidly in the Coponawi Islands since the Second World War. Nuclear tests had taken place in the vicinity and had put them on the map. Hippy colonies from California and Sydney had waxed there in the ’sixties and waned there in the ’seventies. Tourism had burgeoned, concrete blocks had risen among the coconut palms, and only the occasional disappearance of a well-fed mid-Westerner, and the subsequent discovery of sneakers or orange-feathered alpine hat had led people to wonder whether old habits didn’t die hard. Mr Achituko’s mind had been formed by Peace Corps volunteers, very nearly deformed at the University of Hawaii, and now he was studying cultic offshoots of the major religions at the University of South Wessex, where a group of atheists and defrocked priests ran a very high-powered Comparative Religion Department. His was now a well-honed, highly sophisticated mind, though when he had recently visited the George Eliot Museum at Nuneaton the curator had been astonished to see him at various points during the guided tour performing the fourteen Stations of the Cross.

  Thinking it over in bed on Saturday night, after the encounter with Lill in the Rose and Crown, Mr Achituko had been highly amused that Lill should suspect him of having designs on little Mrs Watson up the road. For in fact he was sleeping, on and off, with little Debbie Hodsden down the road, and he wouldn’t have minded betting that, had she known, Lill would have been livid, not with moral outrage, but with jealousy.

  Of course, it was hardly a settled thing with Debbie and could not be yet, even if Achituko decided to stay in Britain beyond the end of the academic year. His landlady was a woman of comparatively liberal mind (he had been accepted by her as a lodger after a long succession of Todmarshians had suddenly and unaccountably decided not to let rooms to students that academic year), but she had made it clear that she drew the line at miscegenational sex. ‘It’s not so much me,’ she had explained, in fear of attracting to herself that most hated of modem labels, being called narrow-minded, ‘it’s what the neighbours might say. You know what people are.’

  Still, Wednesday night was bingo night for her, and now and again as Spring had approached things had been possible under the inky grey skies. In the Coponawi Islands Debbie would already be a mother, and about to take on those extra rolls of flesh that were the signs of status and prosperity in those latitudes. Mr Achituko certainly did not think of himself as debauching a minor, but neither did he think of taking her with him when he returned home: he had no very high opinion of the chastity or housekeeping of English women, and it might have caused trouble with his wife and three children on the islands.

  This Wednesday he was staying home to rough out a chapter of his thesis, dealing with various exciting Coptic heresies, but he had managed to exchange a couple of words with Debbie as she flew for her school bus, and he felt the day was likely to be a satisfying mixture of the sacred and the profane. However his sally to the gate had been observed, and when his landlady came to clear away his breakfast things she lingered meaningfully, and finally said: ‘Quite friendly with the Hodsdens, aren’t you?’

  ‘So-so,’ said Mr Achituko, flashing his irresistible black and white smile. ‘I see them sometimes in the Rose and Crown.’

  ‘So I heard,’ said Mrs Evangeline Carstairs (Eve to her friends), a considerable, opinionated and not unattractive woman whose husband worked in Bristol and was generally only to be seen at weekends, exhausted by work, Mrs Carstairs and British Rail. ‘Of course, it’s just a matter of taste, isn’t it?’

  ‘You dislike them, do you?’ asked Achituko, who preferred to come out into the open with her, since her opinions were pithier when there were no polite manœuvrings.

  ‘Oh, the children are all right,’ said Eve Carstairs, crashing plates and saucers around on the tray. ‘Though if you ask me, the boys are a poor-spirited lot to put up with it the way they do . . .’ She ostentatiously said no more.

  ‘But the parents—?’

  ‘Well, you couldn’t say anything against Fred, I suppose, because there’s really nothing there, is there? More like a tadpole than what I’d call a man. But her—if you ask me she lets the road down and has since the day she came here. She’s common as dirt, and if you believe half of what you hear around town, she’s got the morals of an alley cat with it!’

  ‘Really?’ said Mr Achituko, who in fact knew infinitely more about Lill’s activities than Mrs Carstairs. ‘I must admit that at times I find her a little—embarrassing.’

  ‘Don’t we all? ’Course, you’ve got the colour thing with it, which makes it worse. Still, it’s that daughter of hers I feel really sorry for: you feel it at that age. I expect Debbie does, doesn’t she?’

  She looked at him with a knowing air.

&n
bsp; ‘Very likely,’ said Achituko noncommittally. He wondered for a moment if—were things to come out into the open—Mrs Carstairs would be persuaded to give her blessing to his activities with Debbie. But, wisely, he remembered her age and refrained. And in fact Mrs Carstairs had quite other things on her mind, for as she took the tray out she said:

  ‘If I was the girl I’d leave town as soon as I could. Get a job somewhere—she’s not stupid. But nobody around here who knew the mother would want anything to do with the daughter. Whatever they say, there’s such a thing as bad blood!’

  For Eve Carstairs did not look with favour on Mr Achituko’s choice. After all, she was herself a woman in the prime of life, magnificently fleshed, and in all the time he had been there Achituko had come no closer to the personal than to praise her Yorkshire puddings.

  • • •

  ‘What were you and Achituko talking about?’ asked Brian as he and Debbie climbed breathless on to the school bus.

  ‘Just passing the time of day,’ said Debbie. ‘Get off my back, will you?’ And she went up front and sat with her friends, where they talked about various spotty and loudmouthed youths whom her friends fancied and Debbie felt she was now infinitely too experienced to contemplate seriously. But she hugged her secret to herself, and gave bored attention to the discussion of the finer points of these adolescents.

  Brian sat in the back seat of the upper deck, surrounded by his fellow sixth-formers touching up their last night’s prep. But after a minute or two Brian, remembering that encounter between Debbie and Achituko at the Carstairs’ gate, went off into a dream. Was there something between those two? No—couldn’t possibly be. Debbie was much too young. Still, there were girls who . . . he knew there were girls that age at the High School who . . . But Debbie wasn’t the type. She was just an ordinary schoolgirl. He’d seen her grow up. Now Lill at that age! . . . She’d once told a story about herself at sixteen, an encounter with the shop-floor manager of the cuddly-toy factory in Leicester where she had worked . . . ‘Oh, he was a saucy one!’ Lill had ended, having got herself and him into the works canteen after the rest had knocked off. Brian had laughed with the rest, and later he had gone up and been sick in the bathroom.

  He remembered Lill in Tunisia . . . Why was it always Tunisia? . . . He remembered Lill and the middle-aged German with the bulbous body like a potter’s discard . . . the way he lingered heavily round them by the swimming-pool in the first days, the way he started buying Lill expensive drinks, pawing her when Fred was not around, uttering guttural endearments and giggling obscenities when the younger ones went off into the pool . . .

  He remembered Lill on the beach, surrounded by the sellers of bangles and pots and rugs and sunhats—swarthy men and boys, haphazardly clad, men the other English declared were terrible pests and waved away, fearful of being swindled. But Lill had welcomed them, and chattered away to them in pidgin Midlands, admiring their wares, trying them on, exacting their homage, now and then fetching out her purse and buying one of the pots that now sat unsteadily on the mantelpieces and coffee-tables around the house (the pot-seller had been young, younger than her sons, and doe-eyed, and wicked). Lill had lapped it up. ‘They think I’m marvellous,’ she would announce at dinner. ‘Nobody else will talk to them, stuck-up lot. I could fancy one or two of them too, even if they are wogs! I wish they’d come selling things round my back door at home!’

  And he remembered the boys that day he and Gordon had walked alone into Hammamet, the boys who ran after them as they lounged around the medina, laughing, prancing, joking and shouting—shouting ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec ma sœur?’ and then . . .

  ‘Here wake up, dreamy,’ said the boy next to him. ‘I want to read your answer to the question on Lord of the Flies.’

  • • •

  As luck would have it, Lill and Mrs Carstairs found themselves alone behind the butcher’s counter that morning, Lill waiting to buy a pound and a half of snags, while Eve Carstairs bought some nice kidney chops.

  ‘That’s right,’ yelled Lill, with that unconsciousness of her effect on others that was her hallmark and her death-warrant, ‘you feed up my Archie. Don’t want my lover-boy wasting away.’

  Mrs Carstairs compressed her lips, looked straight across the counter at the butcher with an expression of conspiratorial long-suffering, and said: ‘Nobody can say I don’t give my lodgers good value.’

  ‘Hope you get good value in exchange, then,’ said Lill with a squawk of laughter. ‘Lucky old you, that’s what I say. I got a taste for darkies in Tunisia.’

  Perhaps she touched a raw emotional nerve in Eve Carstairs, perhaps it was the butcher’s presence, so obviously enjoying himself, that made Eve take her up on something she ordinarily would have contemptuously passed over. At any rate, she wheeled round with whiplash suddenness and said: ‘And what is that supposed to imply?’

  Lill laughed on cheerily, regardless of anger or opposition: ‘Oh, no offence. I’d give a quid for your luck. If my hubby was away all week like yours I’d have a couple of darkies—one for my bed and a reserve in the spare room!’

  Eve Carstairs exploded. ‘If you want to know who is sleeping with Achituko, you’d best go and ask your own daughter,’ she spat, and flounced from the shop.

  • • •

  Gordon Hodsden, cycling home from the shipyard that Wednesday at five, saw Ann Watson walking with her little girl towards the recreation ground. He rode up beside the kerb in front of her and stood waiting till she came up, straddled across his bike.

  ‘I say, I’m sorry if my mum’s been round your place saying things, and that. She gets ideas in her head, you know, but she doesn’t mean any harm.’

  Ann Watson, looking at him—his appealing smile, his obvious good-will, his chunky presentability—nevertheless felt her anger at Lill spurting up anew. ‘Well, she ought to be careful,’ she said. ‘People like her do a lot of harm, even if they don’t intend to.’

  ‘But you can’t tell my mum that,’ said Gordon, widening that disingenuous smile. ‘If she thinks a thing she goes ahead and says it. It’s not her fault, really, it’s what she’s like. All she wants is to help people.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s best not to interfere,’ said Ann Watson, almost rudely indicating she wanted to be off. ‘People are better off left to themselves.’

  ‘Oh, Mum has to do her little bit—wouldn’t be happy otherwise,’ said Gordon gaily. ‘Well, just thought I’d say something. Hope there’s no hard feelings.’

  And he rode off, apparently unconscious of the fact that there was no reply. But as he rode, his face darkened into an expression as unlike that open, smiling boyishness as it could possibly be, and, lowering and heavily thoughtful, he pedalled furiously the last stretch of the way home. Well, that’s cooked my goose with her, he thought. She wouldn’t give a second thought to someone as stupid as I made myself out to be. All in a good cause, though. There’ll be time to bring her round—afterwards.

  • • •

  ‘What do you think about when my mother goes on like she did on Saturday night?’ asked Debbie of Mr Achituko as they lay, close and cosy, in his single bed at No. 38 at nine o’clock that evening.

  ‘Think about? As little as possible. I just let it wash over me,’ said Achituko, shrugging his fleshy shoulders.

  ‘Yes, but when she goes on about your colour and whether it washes off and all that sort of stuff, like she does all the time. It had me cringing. I mean you must react to that, surely. It’s about your skin—about you.’

  Achituko leaned over her lean, adolescent body and drew his brown finger down her cheek. ‘Does yours come off? Do I get white chalk marks all over my finger? No, it doesn’t. And you don’t get annoyed, do you?’

  Debbie giggled. ‘That’s different. You’re not Lill. Anyway, I’m white. Nobody . . . nobody despises whites.’

  I do, I do, thought Achituko. But he merely smiled his wide, open smile at her naivety.

  ‘I’d love to have
seen you give her a tremendous slosh round the chops,’ said Debbie, with relish. ‘I was sitting there hoping for it. That’s what I’m going to do before very long, one day when she really gets my goat.’

  ‘You’d better wait, little fire-cracker,’ said Achituko. ‘She’s a tough customer, your mother. Better wait till you’re a little older. Or leave it to me to do, when she finds out about us.’

  ‘Just so long as I’m there,’ said Debbie, with a childish, anticipatory smile. ‘But I wish you’d done it on Saturday. That’d have stopped her going on about how she loves wogs.’

  ‘You’ve got a violent nature, you know that, girl?’ And Achituko lay there chuckling happily, cuddling her to him, his eyes dark and thoughtful in the shadowy bedroom.

  • • •

  Outside in the darkness, as far as possible from the street-lamps and sheltered by an overhanging apple tree, Lill waited silently, puffing on a rolled cigarette which she hid in the palm of her cupped hand. There were no lights in Eve Carstairs’s house, and not a sound emerging. She had loitered past earlier, twice, but had not heard a whisper. And yet, surely, if they made love there at any time, it must be Wednesday nights. When Eve Carstairs invariably went to bingo. Lill’s lip curled. Normally she herself would be at bingo tonight. Very convenient for the little slut, she thought: both mother and landlady out. She only kicked herself that she had let Debbie disappear after tea without following her. No doubt she had gone off to a friend’s, then come back here later. It hadn’t been practicable to keep a constant watch until night had fallen. In half an hour Mrs Carstairs would be on her way home. Debbie would be well out of the house by then, if she had any sense. Twenty minutes more and she’d give up.

  She stiffened. A light went on momentarily in the hall of 38, then off again, but in those two seconds she had seen two shapes through the lead-lighted window in the front door. Now the door was opening silently, now there were muttered intimacies—Lill ground her cigarette under her heel savagely—now a dark shape was through the tiny front garden, out through the gate, and off down the road in the other direction. Lill left the shadow of the Cox’s Orange and hared off after it. Sure enough, the shadow turned into No. 10, and she heard her own back door open and shut.