Stanley, his blazer hung from the privy’s latch, feeds the chalky inner tubing into the steel groove — Gilbert, Gilbert Cook . . does something similar so that Audrey bites my lip —. But not yet — before then, when Albert sits at the kitchen table, his shirtsleeves cinched by fascinating bands, their parents are already styling themselves Deeth, to rhyme with teeth Sam picks, his face swellin’ beet-red. You’ll have an apoplexy, guv’nor, says Albert, dipping his nib and filling in Olive’s line of the census form with quick, clever, cursive, clerkish writing. Don’t guv’nor me, you jack-gentleman, Sam growls, what matter if we change an a to an e? Whose business but our own? Albert has his father’s hand-me-down face, which would be handsome enough onna a fat man, although it appears queer on their tapered heads — the smooth flesh bunching up at their brows and along their jawlines. It’d be the Ministry’s business, I’d say, t’would be better if you left off — and as he speaks Albert continues to write, Death, Violet May, daughter, — , — —, —, Secondary, his pen morsing from box to box, the dashes indicating further shared characteristics — ’til at least I’ve gone into rooms, I’ve no wish to speak for the others. . who, despite having grown up with Albert always before them, are still agog when he does two things at once, both perfectly: piano playing and reading the evening paper, timing an egg while totting up the household accounts — no alternation between hand and foot, or coordination between eye and hand faults him, no variability of scales confounds him. ’E’s twins inna single skin, said a local wag, seeing Bert unerringly volley a football even as he was marking possibles for the guv’nor in the Pink ’Un with a stub of pencil — this when father and son were still close, down at Craven Cottage, the playing field all round kicked and stamped into a happily tortured morass. Audrey thought: if we’re Death, then Uncle James must be dearth — this a word gleaned from Bible and Bunyan at school, for the Deaths are not regular attendees, let alone communicants.
When four out of the five Death children had left the house on Waldemar Avenue, Death, Samuel A. Theodore, 51, married, 31 years, Night Garage Inspector, Omnibus Coy, Worker, was still known, familiarly, as Rothschild Death, on account of the flutters and the rabbit-skin coat, and the arf and arfs he downed in pubs and penny gaffs from King Street to Parsons Green and Mortlake beyond, ales that imparted a jovial gloss to his coating of bombast. Familiarly, yes, for those sort won’t be told, but formally it was Deeth, and when the three Deeths transplanted themselves from the London clay to the red Devon loam, with Albert’s assistance taking up residence in a cottage at Cheriton Bishop — where Mary Jane had been raised — they became known locally as the Deers. — Sam Deer totters around the small garden, Olive Deer watches him. She has seen pictures in the illustrated weekly and read the accompanying text. The pictures are obscure — the words surpassing allusive. Olive, who knows nothing of adult bodies besides her own, still wonders how it is that they get food into the women in Holloway Prison who won’t eat. . who keep their jaws clamped shut. She wonders what it might be like to tell someone that a twisting rivulet of ants has leaked into the cottage from the rain-washed garden. Got in, flowed up the stairs, sopped up the grooves of the candlewick and, not unpleasantly, are infesting me merry bit . .
Stanley mends the inner tube, feeding it through the water in the wooden pail, the kinked eel sends a piddle of bubbles to the surface. He pulls it out, mops it, marks its gills with the chalk. Caught in the kink, the corridor stretching away in front of her. . longer than time, Audrey burns with covetousness for that safety bicycle, convinced she can ride it better than him — fix it quicker. Neat as a pin in the tailor-made she’s bought with her first week’s wages from Ince’s, she covets it — and resents him. It was one thing to be still soaping Bert’s collars — from when they were nippers his primacy was taken so much for granted that there was no more need to speak of it than what you got upter in the privy. But Stanley — her baby, her bumps-a-daisy, that he should have this and not her, well, she was reft, the suspicion creeping into her that he’s never given a fig for her. Playing out, playing Queenie — and I was Queenie, and the Wiggins boys all mocking me . .and that lousy boy, who come up from Sands End — the one Mother said az the stink of gas onnis togs — picks up the ball and dips it inna puddle, then rolls it in some horse shit, and when I turn round he throws it at me so ’ard the string busts and all the soggy, shitty paper wraps round my face and spatters my pinny, an’ Stan leaps on ’im, thumpinim proper, defendin’ his big sis, and the Sands End kid ad vese big obnail boots, no stockings, juss vese boots. . coming down on Stan’s face. . a yelp! The Wiggins boys screamin’, turnin’ tail. There mustabin a nail come loose — there was that much blood. When Bert come out of the house and dragimoff, the Sands End kid was spittin’, Garn! Piss up yer leg an play wiv ve steam! Still. . maybe. . maybe even then it was all a bloody show . .
Cold meat, mutton pies, Tell me when your mother dies . . November in Foulham, the streets greasily damp — the colour of rotten logs. Bad air from the river, bad air from the Works, rotten malt gusting from the Lamb brewery over Chiswick way. In the back bedroom Audrey rubs the soot-stained muslin curtain against her cheek and peers down in the near-darkness at the backyards of their terrace and those of the terraces behind, fret-worked by walls and fences into separate territories, each with its own upright hut. . a command post — Ladysmith relieved. Come inter the ga-arden, Maude! And see the raspberry canes scattered spilikins, the humpback of an abandoned cask, a pile of bricks, a birdcage shaped like the Crystal Palace that them two doors down adfer a myna, which had croaked back at the cat’s-meat-man: Ca-a-at’s me-eat! Until p’raps a cat gotit. Audrey! Or-dree! Cummun get yer tea! Cat meat, mutton pies, Tell me when your mother dies . . She should have been down there with her sisters, fetching yesterday’s leg of mutton down from the meat safe, peeling and boiling potatoes, scraping dripping from the pale blue enamel basin. Or-dree! She can’t be doin’ wivvit. Time enough for tasks later — her soda-scraped hands bloaters floating in the scummy water. Besides, she cannot abide her mother just now — Mary Jane who stinks of chlorodyne, and slumps narcotised on the horsehair chaise her sons dragged in from the parlour when it split. Her Ladysmith, a bell tent of grey woollen shawl and black bombazine, her tired auburn hair down rusting on her big shoulders. I can’t be bovvered wiv me stays, she says, not when me mulleygrubs comes upon me. Audrey is repelled by her — disgusted that her mother vouchsafes her women’s ailment to her alone — the sly thing, Or-dree! — where they jumble together in the sewn-in pockets of time swung apart from the general shindy of Death family life.