*
One Saturday towards the end of August she reached boiling point. During breakfast my father and I did not speak. I kept my eyes on my plate while he glanced sideways at the newspaper lying on the table among crumbs and spots of jam. She bustled about, adjusting table settings and moving and re-moving a stack of my comics from one side table to another.
“Paradise,” my father murmured to himself. He had folded the newspaper to the page with the crossword. “Four letters.”
“Eden,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows, lowered the tip of his ballpoint on to the paper and nodded.
I knew he knew the word without me telling him. He also knew how risky it was, with my mother hovering so close, to give the impression of being in any way pleased.
She strode towards the mantelpiece. I saw my father cringe. Woe betide him if there were any unpaid bills among the envelopes stuffed behind the clock, which she shifted ever so slightly with futile but measured precision to achieve an exact parallel with the ledge.
We ducked like schoolboys as she swept past on her way out of the room. She reappeared wearing her grey nylon apron.
“The upstairs room needs a good clean,” she said curtly. “I’m not waiting till just before they arrive.”
She had tied on a headscarf and knotted it under her chin, and was wearing blue galoshes. She made for the stairs bearing her brooms and long-handled mops like hatchets in the crook of her arm.
“But first I’ll have a go at that pigsty of yours,” she said in passing, without looking at me.
I heard her climb the stairs. She swore when a scrubbing brush slipped out of a pail and skidded down several steps.
“Why can’t you clear up your own room for once?” my father asked, not expecting an answer. He got up. “We’d better start doing our bit.”
*
Up in the attic there was a stack of planks covered by an old blanket, which we were to assemble into a bed.
“It’s time the bed came down from up there,” my mother had said several times over the past few days, in the aggrieved tone that she used in all her utterances.
We carried the planks down from the attic and left them in the room next to mine, where she was rushing around in a frenzy of tidying. She had already put my boxes containing the discarded body parts of bears and dolls by the door, so she could burn them in the back garden. I had no difficulty picturing the horror on her face as she carried the jar containing dead beetles outside, and her disgust when she found the bean plant with its roots tangled in the holes of the sponge, from which they had extracted the last drop of moisture before drying up completely.
It was my job to hold the planks level while he slid the ends into the notches in the headboard and screwed them in place.
My mother scrubbed the rusty stain in the washbasin and the spots on the mirror above until she was too exhausted to continue. She gave the writing desk, newly varnished by my father, an extra polish with her chamois and lined the shelves of the wall cabinet with dark brown paper.
It had been a few days since she had rubbed linseed oil into the floorboards. Now the heady, petrol-like smell deepened my unease at the prospect of my cousin Roland’s arrival within the next few hours.
*
Had no-one ever noticed there was something peculiar about Roland’s mother? With each family celebration, with each funeral her glossy furs seemed more extravagant and her cheeks more thickly streaked with powder. With each successive gathering she had grown less steady on her feet. It was as if she might collapse any moment under the weight of her gold jewellery, of which she wore increasing quantities until her neck and wrists were buried in precious stones. The more lavish her attire, the louder the note of despair in her ostentation.
I had visited their house just once. It was an immaculate villa with a scattering of ornamental rocks in the garden and a small fountain in front, where the gleam of gravel on the garden path and the Chinese vases on the window sill added to the impression of genteel grandeur. At my house they didn’t mind if I came to the table with dirty hands. They didn’t mind if I sailed toy boats on the slushy moat around the muck heap. I wore the smell of stables like the scent of the great outdoors, and if I tore my shirt on the holly hedge in search of blackbirds’ nests I seldom got a clip around the ear, all I got was an angry look and it was over.
That afternoon found us gathered around the table like sculptures moulded to our seats, staring fixedly at the lace tablecloth and the platters with tarts that looked as if they had been modelled in clay.
Roland’s mother sank her knife into the iced cake with a flourish, and when her thumb inadvertently scooped an arabesque of whipped cream she had cringed as if it were a mortal sin. She had gone to the kitchen, where she could be heard shuffling her feet and blowing her nose repeatedly. An embarrassed silence had ensued, in which the clock ticking in the hall sounded faintly sarcastic.
Roland hadn’t thought of offering to show me around. He was stuck on his chair as if he were carved in stone, with his hands tucked under his thighs. When his father finally told us to be off, half the doors in the house turned out to be locked.
Through the keyholes lurked sofas with extravagantly carved legs. They were rarely sat on, and the cushions hadn’t been touched since the last time someone had arranged them prettily against the back. There were books permanently cloistered behind glass, their spines pristine, untouched.
My cousin didn’t have boxes with shells hidden away in his room. There wasn’t a single shelf on which he kept rocks picked from the bed of a stream for the sake of their veins of gold that no-one had thought to mine.
We went into the garden. He showed me the rope ends dangling from the limb of an ailanthus tree, where his swing had been until the day he landed in the middle of mother’s dahlia bed, plank and all.
We mooched among the flowerbeds edged with box and kicked a football around half-heartedly, anxious that a poorly aimed shot might knock a Greek god off his pedestal. From the other side of the fence came the sound of girls playing in the neighbours’ swimming pool. Beach balls soared like colourful enticements over the conifer hedge. Elsewhere, boys would be storming sand castles, laying ambushes and fighting lightning battles.
*
I hadn’t seen much of Roland since that day, and even less of his mother. Later, when he started secondary school, there was talk of him throwing crockery around, breaking windows and stealing from shops. She had packed him off to boarding school, but he’d made such a nuisance of himself there that he’d been expelled before the year was out. Then one day, in the summer before my twelfth birthday, his father came to visit us on his own. I saw him at the kitchen table with my father, drinking gin. He sat with one of his arms hanging lamely over the back of the wooden chair, fidgeting with the frayed edge of the rush seat. His expression was as dark as a leaden sky before a hailstorm.
After he had left my father took me to the orchard.
“Roland’s coming to stay with us for a while,” he said. “It’s for the best.”
I already had a new bicycle, which I kept in the old stable. A proper bike with a big lamp powered by a dynamo which purred when I pedalled hard over the dyke in anticipation of Roland’s arrival. Flying ducks skimmed my head as they swooped down to land on the water. I craned my neck to make the wind, which hugged me closer than my clothes, sing loudly in my hair.
CHAPTER 2
HIS FATHER BROUGHT HIM by car. They stood facing each other forlornly in the yard. They unloaded his bike from the luggage rack, took two suitcases out of the boot, a couple of coats and a bag containing winter clothes.