The Man Who Didn't Go to Newcastle Page 4
I was desolate. My brother, who I’d naturally presumed would one day become my husband, was suddenly off limits.
‘Will I be able to marry Adrian as thoon ath I’m a big lady, Auntie Betty?’ Barbara lisped, her chin resting on our second best, blue and pink checked tablecloth.
Open-mouthed I waited for my mother’s response.
‘Yes, Barbara. You could marry Adrian. If he asked you. It’s just that Ali can’t marry Adrian because he’s her brother and no one can marry their brother or sister. Or any relation for that matter.’
‘Why not, Auntie Betty?’
‘Because…they might have funny babies,’ Mum replied, popping the tea cosy back over the pot. ‘My bridesmaid, Elsie, married her cousin and two of her babies were funny.’
I fought back tears, grappling with a vision of a pram full of funny babies. My world had been shot through in an instant. Not only had I lost my future husband in the time it took my mother to stir a spoon and a half of Tate and Lyle into her teacup, but I was faced with the prospect of having to conjure up a substitute groom. The thought of marrying someone other than Adrian was appalling. I’d have to spend my life with someone I didn’t even know. My parents clearly knew each other well, as did the parents of my friends.
‘You could marry Michael Thomath,’ Barbara suggested in a small, slightly smug voice.
Michael Thomas – the cleverest boy in my class. I appealed to my mother. Would this at least be possible?
‘Yes, of course you could marry Michael Thomas. You could marry anyone – when you’re old enough. Just not Adrian.’
I felt mildly consoled. Well, I was only six.
During our primary school years in the frugal lower-middle-class housing estate in Coney Hall, West Wickham, Kent, England, The World, The Universe, Adrian and I were forced together to create our own entertainment, only occasionally joining forces with Barbara, who lived three doors away and came in handy to make up the numbers. We were doctors and nurses, mothers and fathers, Cowboys and Indians – although Adrian always got to be the cowboy. Barbara, being younger than us and therefore inferior in status, took on the supporting roles of patient, baby or horse.
With the double leather holsters Mum made us for Christmas fastened round our waists Adrian and I would hide behind the bushes in our front garden and frighten passers-by, shooting caps into the air. Not that there were many passers-by. We lived at the top of a very long road and the only people who came past our house were those trekking the extra few steps to the last six houses at the top.
We had a corner plot, hidden at the side by the privet hedge Mum hacked at every summer with a blunt pair of garden shears. The pavement which started out as a dirt track was laid with paving slabs when I was five. At the same time the gas lamps, which were lit every night by a man who rode up on a bike, were replaced by modern electric lights.
On the other side of the road, fields stretched to the horizon. Dad, who was brought up in Clapham, loved the semi-rural setting of our house which looked out onto the open countryside.
‘We’re so lucky to look out on the open countryside,’ he’d say as we sat in our front room eating our poached eggs on toast. ‘Green belt. What a view!’ he’d proclaim, surveying the tree lined field from the panorama of the modern windows he’d made and installed himself. For years I wondered what he meant, imagining a belt like the one I wore with my Brownie uniform, but green.
What Dad didn’t have, he made. When something didn’t work, he fixed it. And if he didn’t own the tools he needed, he borrowed them from Barbara Barker’s dad.
Not one to chuck money about, Dad’s philosophy was that if one man could do something, then so could he. We lived in a house with no shed and so he built one himself. He designed it, laid the foundations and cemented every brick. Adrian and I watched the shed grow inch by inch. I remember the excitement when it was finished. The smell of freshly sawn wood mixed with a drier smell of concrete and brick. I also remember the key to the shed which was black, and longer than any of our other keys. Dad was a great one for keys and locking things up. Security was an important part of his life. But building and making things was too.
For a salesman who sold brake linings and claimed never to have earned more than six thousand pounds in any one year of his entire life, building sheds – and anything else he wanted – was perhaps a necessity. Certainly he’d go to any lengths not to hand over his money to tradesmen. My father, who had no training in carpentry, also made fitted wardrobes in all our bedrooms. Years later when we moved he replicated them all in the next house. He added a porch onto both houses he owned, built a garage, dug a fishpond and constructed mantelpieces.
He was a prolific reader, but Dad didn’t like to own books. He visited the library once a month and took out the maximum four books which he kept under his bed. The books were always non-fiction. He dismissed novels as a waste of time. Most of what he read related to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or biographies and autobiographies of the weirdly famous.
He loved music, and one of my earliest memories is of Dad cranking up the gramophone he’d made from a piece of wood, an old plate, a screwdriver for a handle and an on/off switch that started life as a teaspoon. He had ten 78rpm records kept in brown paper sleeves. A few of these were cracked, but he still managed to play them around the cracks. The ones I remember were: “The Flight of the Bumblebee”; “The Peanut Vendor” by Stan Kenton; “Oh, Island In The Sun” by Harry Belafonte; a strange talking recording of a man making a sound like a train gathering speed; and “Woodman, Spare That Tree” by an American called Phil Harris. This last record was also spoken rather than sung and was basically a plea from a man to a woodman who’d come to fell a tree near his house. The man begs the woodman not to cut the tree down because he climbs it to get away from his wife and it’s his only place of refuge. I had to ask Dad to explain this as I couldn’t grasp why a man would want to climb a tree to get away from his wife. Secretly I worried that my husband, if I ever had one (which seemed doubtful in view of my mother’s recent revelation about my brother), might head for the nearest tree. The “Woodman” record was Dad’s favourite. He didn’t just sit back and listen to his 78s, he joined in, sang (or spoke) along and flailed his arms while we soaked up his enjoyment.
When Dad’s shed was half built he took a test tube from Adrian’s chemistry set and a sheet of paper from Mum’s Basildon Bond writing pad. He told us to write a message for the future. We wrote our names, ages, the names of our cat (Bengy) and our fish (Sammy) and the date, 3rd November 1960. He rolled the paper up and slid it into the test tube. The tube was then ceremoniously cemented into the gap between two of the bricks on the left hand side just under the window frame.
This was one of the many things I loved about my father. Not only did he make so many bits and pieces (although, at the time, I’d have much preferred shop-bought things like everyone else), but he saw beyond the here and now and decided to put a time capsule into the cement of his homemade shed for someone to read in years to come. This was what I admired so much. His mixture of practical and visionary.
*
Would Dad buy a home assembly shed from the internet if he was here now? Probably. Although he always seemed to do things differently from everyone else. Certainly he did things that my friends’ dads didn’t do. He swore, and aped about. In the summer he’d fill a basin with cold water in the garden. We had to put our faces in and see how long we could hold our breath. When we went on holiday he’d walk along the bottom of the seabed doing the breast-stroke movement with his arms – pretending he could swim when we all knew he couldn’t. One autumn he got a group of Adrian’s friends together, Robin Ings, John Commerford, Martin Phillips amongst them, and started up their own football team. All those boys came back to see him at our house, even when Dad was an old man.
He’d been a pilot in the war and kept his old RAF jacket up in the loft with its strange wires and plugs sewn into the lining. He had stories he repeat
ed over and over about his young life during the war years. One was about a woman who got into a train and when a man slammed the door catching her hand in the door, her hand fell off and landed in another man’s trilby. He usually chose to tell us this anecdote, with various embellishments, while we were eating. Adrian nearly choked with laughter one lunch time on Mum’s jam roly-poly pudding. But the hilarity around the table was tempered by Mum’s anger because Adrian had spat out the pudding she’d so lovingly made.
Most of my dad’s stories illustrated the carefree, daredevil days of his youth when he got up to all kinds of crazy things with his friends in the RAF. Photos of him at that time show a handsome dark-haired pilot. Even in semi-detached suburbia he managed to maintain that aura of glamour. Unlike any of our neighbours, he had a job that provided us with a brand new car every year…and he put a time capsule in a garden shed.
*
At the top of our road a gate led to Bluebell Woods where trees arched above a wide path flanked on either side (at the right time of the year) by a carpet of bluebells. One spring when our grandparents were visiting – a rare occurrence since we usually visited them – Adrian and I rigged up a secret teddy bears’ picnic in the woods, surreptitiously taking our teddies to a clearing and seating them in a circle. We then took Grandpa up to the woods and pretended we had no idea how the bears got there. Grandpa, being of the child-friendly variety – he once owned a toyshop and a dolls’ hospital – was convincingly duped.
But without adult company Bluebell Woods could transform from benign nature walk into sinister shadowy forest where big boys sometimes inexplicably drove motorbikes along the paths and even wove in and out of the trees, and where I first remember being really terrified, even though Adrian was with me. We were on our way home after collecting bluebells to give to Mum for her birthday when three ‘big boys’ came up behind us.
‘Just keep walking,’ one of them threatened. ‘We’ve all got guns and I’ve got a gun pointed at your backs. If you don’t keep walking I’m going to shoot you both.’
I could sense Adrian’s fear as we quickened our pace, neither of us daring to look round. We’d seen enough episodes of Rawhide to imagine the feeling of the barrel of a gun in the small of your back. I could almost smell the smoke, and as soon as we exited the Bluebell Woods gates we ran for it, dropping our flowers behind us.
‘Don’t tell anyone what happened,’ Adrian warned me with as much menace as the big boys’ threats. I longed to share this frightening experience with Mum (as in years to come when Adrian snogged Sue post James Bond), but I could sense Adrian’s shame. He hadn’t been brave enough to fight the big boys, to turn round and wrestle the guns from them – which were probably cap guns from the toy shop in Coney Hall, or even more likely sticks, or just gloved index fingers.
*
I often felt sorry for Adrian because of the burden of being the eldest. Whenever we went out together my father always warned him, ‘Look after your sister. She’s only a girl.’ This admonishment made me feel special, precious and worthy of looking after, although the word ‘only’ struck a pre-women’s lib chord somewhere deep in my psyche. For Adrian I suspect Dad’s warning made him wish he could go out on his own without the responsibility of making sure I returned in one piece.
*
Now I’m very much alone and feeling a little nervous as I put my brother’s key into his front door. I’m like an intruder, but thankfully don’t feel as bleak as I’d thought I might, arriving without him to greet me.
The flat smells as I remember it – a musty, warm kind of blokey smell which is both reassuring and cosy. I’ve always felt relaxed and at home here. I usually prefer old properties, whereas all three flats Adrian has owned have been new builds. But he’s made each of them homely.
From the hallway I go from room to room, making sure there’s no one here. No burglars or squatters. Each room has a selection of lights and dimmer switches. Adrian likes his lighting. A matching pair of double-seater sofas face each other in the middle of the sitting room. The sofas are a light grey colour but are now stained with spots of blood. A pine coffee table sits between them, the sides of which are marked with cigarette burns. His television is a ten inch portable with an orange surround and is only watchable from one of the sofas. I’m sure he watches TV a lot but whereas we’ve had a wide-screen plasma for a few years, he still keeps this antique with its limited selection of channels and distorting green glow on BBC1.
Three of the walls in the sitting room are yellow. The fourth is taken up with huge windows and a glass door that leads to a balcony. The windows have yellow Venetian blinds which are permanently open. On the balcony two plastic garden chairs huddle beside a collection of pots containing dead flowers and shrubs. Adrian’s living room shelves are covered in nick-nacks. Things he’s brought home from his travels. The walls are decorated with pictures, prints mainly and the many masks he’s accumulated from all over the world. He has racks of CDs: The Steve Miller Band, Stevie Winwood, Pink Floyd, Bobby Darin, The Rolling Stones, as well as many differently decorated ashtrays and oriental bowls. Lots of Egyptian style artefacts that he may have got in Egypt or in the British Museum. Figures, more ashtrays, and masks. Two over-sized chess pieces, a king and queen made of plaster of Paris, sit side by side on a shelf.
Dominating the living room is a print of a Picasso painting, Buste de Femme au Chapeau. The picture takes up half the wall and screams the primary colours, red, blue and Adrian’s favourite – yellow. He has an ashtray decorated with the same image. At the other end of the room two lithographs of deckchairs blowing in the wind on Brighton Beach hang side by side. A drinks trolley next to these pictures is home to bottles of spirits – Armagnac, vodka, brandy, whisky and some soft mixers, as well as a large pack of Marlboro cigarettes, the duty-free kind you bring back from holiday. The outer packaging has been broken and some taken out. The top is covered in a layer of dust.
From the living room I go past the kitchen and the tiny bathroom, into the spare bedroom. Adrian inherited Dad’s DIY skills and has carried on the family tradition of building fitted wardrobes and book shelves in both bedrooms. His books are history books, autobiographies, three books about Shakespeare, one about the Globe Theatre, travel guides, historical novels by Hilary Mantel and Alison Weir, most of Ian McEwan’s novels. Unlike Dad, he loves fiction. The spare bedroom contains a double bed and his office equipment. Two First Aid manuals are laid out on the floor open at the relevant pages for Minor cuts and abrasions and Treatment for severe bleeding. These pages show diagrams of tourniquets and complicated bandage folding techniques. Had Adrian begun swotting up on the rudiments of first aid at this late stage?
*
I go into Adrian’s bedroom. Although I know Carol, one of Adrian’s girlfriends, has been in to clean up the bed and the spots of blood following the incident with the broken wine glass, the mattress and some of the walls still have blood splattered on them which makes the room look like a crime scene.
Hanging on the end of his bed is a yellow tie decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the hallway between the two bedrooms is a picture Adrian made from a collection of cigarette cards showing old footballers. Another picture he’s made consists of twenty packs of Camel cigarettes arranged Andy Warhol style on a plain background. This hangs at the far end of his bed opposite a collage of photographs of old black and white film stars. Greta Garbo, Loretta Young, Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Vivien Leigh, Errol Flynn, Mae West, Gregory Peck – all these icons watch over him every night as he sleeps. Above his bed is picture of a red heart.
The curtains in both bedrooms are old, faded blue velvet ones that don’t fit the windows. These curtains have travelled with him since the seventies.
*
Everything (apart from the blood) is as I remember it from my last visit. But it’s dirty. The carpets are covered in a film of dust. The kitchen floor is greasy, the units in need of a good scrub. My mother was right. The flat does need a w
oman’s touch. Adrian had to let his cleaner go when he took redundancy from his job at BT, so this dirt has accumulated over the past couple of years. I now realise he may have been too unwell to keep things together.
I switch the TV on and catch the end of Deal or No Deal where a woman called Violet deals at twenty-eight-and-a-half grand when she had a hundred thousand in her box. After Deal or No Deal I clean up a bit and risk a cup of tea. I fill the kettle which looks as if it’s been in situ since the 1980s and idly open the freezer only to promptly panic as I can’t close it properly. If Adrian’s fridge is like a hotel mini bar with its various bottles of wine and beer occupying the door space and two magnums of champagne in the main body, then his freezer is like the North Pole in a box. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the odd penguin in there, although there’s no sign of any actual food. No frozen peas or pizzas. No emergency supplies of Findus meals for one or stocks of bread. The interior is clogged with ice. I begin hacking the ice with a kitchen knife in order to shut the door, only to notice ten minutes later that I’ve perforated the white plastic sealant around the edges. This seems like a really bad thing to do. I toy with the idea of phoning Peter to ask his advice but decide against this. Hopeless woman messing up kitchen appliances in someone else’s home – maybe not.
Instead I ram a chair up against the door and then I change into one of my Primark skirts before heading back home. London is boiling compared to Frome and my thick jeans are making my legs feel like spit roasted sausages. Before I leave I make sure everything in the flat is turned off, and fumble for Adrian’s keys.
As I take a last look around, I catch sight of Adrian’s scarf and umbrella hanging on the hook in the hall. His winter trademarks. I feel my tears welling. A red and white Yasser Arafat type cloth hangs there too, a souvenir of the time he worked in Riyadh. I wipe my eyes and make sure I’ve got the paying-in book which is the main reason for my visit. In the kitchen I’d noticed a pile of unopened NatWest statements. A man who leaves bank statements unopened is a worried man – or maybe someone who prefers online banking? I’m pretty sure Adrian doesn’t do his banking online. I blow my nose, close the door behind me, and double lock the Yale as per his instructions.