First Love, Last Rites

  Sissel knelt by the rat, Adrian and I stood behind her like guards, it was as if she had some special right, kneeling there with her long red skirt spilling round her. She parted the gash in the mother rat with her forefinger and thumb, pushed the bag back inside and closed the blood-spiked fur over it. She remained kneeling a little while and we still stood behind her. Then she cleared some dishes from the sink to wash her hands. We all wanted to get outside now, so Sissel wrapped the rat in newspaper and we carried it downstairs. Sissel lifted the lid of the dustbin and I placed it carefully inside. Then I remembered something, I told the other two to wait for me and I ran back up the stairs. It was the eel I came back for, it lay quite still in its few inches of water and for a moment I thought that it too was dead till I saw it stir when I picked up the bucket. The wind had dropped now and the cloud was breaking up, we walked to the quay in alternate light and shade. The tide was coming in fast. We walked down the stone steps to the water’s edge and there I tipped the eel back in the river and we watched him flick out of sight, a flash of white underside in the brown water. Adrian said goodbye to us, and I thought he was going to hug his sister. He hesitated and then ran off, calling out something over his shoulder. We shouted after him to have a good holiday. On the way back Sissel and I stopped to look at the factories on the other side of the river. She told me she was going to give up her job there.

  We lifted the mattress on to the table and lay down in front of the open window, face to face, the way we did at the beginning of summer. We had a light breeze blowing in, a distant smoky smell of autumn, and I felt calm, very clear. Sissel said, This afternoon let’s clean the room up and then go for a long walk, a walk along the river dyke. I pressed the flat of my palm against her warm belly and said, Yes.

  Disguises

  Mina that Mina. Soft and breathy now and thick glasses too remembers her last appearance on stage. Sour Goneril at the Old Vic, she took no nonsense, though friends said even then the mind of that Mina was slipping. Prompted, they say, in act one, shouting at the guilty A.S.M. in the interval, and scratched him with her long vermilion nail, below the eye and to the right, a little nick across the cheek. King Lear stepped between, knighted the week before, a household venerate among non-theatregoers, and the director stepped between, flapping at Mina with his programme sheet. ‘You royal arse-licker’ to one, and ‘You backstage pimp’ to the other, she spat at each and played one more night. And that to give her understudy time. The last night on stage for Mina, what a grande dame she was sweeping here and there, in and out of cue, a train in a tunnel of blank verse, and her proud unpadded bosom lifting with her caterwaul, and brave. She, near the beginning, carelessly tossed a plastic rose into the front row, and when Lear gave forth she had a fancy business with her fan, it raised a titter from time to time. The audience, sophisticated sentients, felt for her and the melodrama of desperation because they knew about Mina and gave a special cheer at curtain call which sent her weeping to her dressing-room and as she went she pressed the back of her hand into her forehead.

  Two days later Brianie died, her sister, Henry’s mother, so Mina confusing dates persuaded Mina at the funeral tea, and this is what she told her friends, she gave up the stage to tend her sister’s child then ten years old and in need, so Mina told her friends, of a real mother, a Real Mother. And Mina was a surreal mother.

  In the drawing-room of her Islington house she drew her nephew to her, pressed his blotchy face into the padded now and scented bosom, and the same again that next day in the taxi to Oxford Street where she bought him a bottle of cologne and a Fauntleroy suit with lace trimmings. In the months she let his hair grow down below the collar and the ears, daring for the early ‘sixties, and encouraged him to dress for dinner, the motif of this story, showed him how to mix her drink from the cocktail cabinet in the evening, had a violin teacher round, a dancing-master too, on his birthday a shirt-maker, and then a photographer with a voice pitched politely high. He came to take faded and brown-tinted shots of Henry and Mina posing in costume before the mantelpiece and it was all, Mina told Henry, it was all good training.

  Good training for what? Henry did not put this question to her or to himself, not an introspect or sensitive, the kind to accept a new life and this narcissism with no opinion either way, all being part of one fact. The fact was his mother had died, her image six months on was elusive like a faint star. There were details, though, and he questioned them. When the photographer flouncing back and across the room packed his tripod and left, Henry asked Mina, returning from the front door, ‘Why does that man have a funny voice?’ He was satisfied understanding nothing from Mina. ‘I think, darling, because he’s queer.’ The pictures came soon in heavy packets with Mina running through the kitchen and out for her glasses and shrieking and giggling and tearing at the stiff brown paper with her fingers. They were in gilded oval frames, she passed them across the table to Henry. At the edge the brown faded to nothing, like smoke, precious and unreal, Henry there, wan, impassive, and a straight back, and one hand was resting lightly on Mina’s shoulder. She was on the piano stool, skirts spilling around, head lifted back a little, attempting a lady’s pout and her hair in a black bun down the nape of her neck. Mina was laughing, excited and getting her other glasses to look at the pictures arm’s length, and turning knocked the milk jug over, laughed more and leaping back in her chair to escape the white streams which dribbled to the floor between her legs. And between the laughs, ‘What do you think, dear? Aren’t they super?’ ‘They’re all right,’ said Henry, ‘I suppose.’

  Good training? Mina did not ask herself either what she meant, but it was to do with the stage if she had, everything Mina did was to do with that. Always on stage even when alone an audience watched and her actions were for them, a kind of superego, she dared not displease them or herself, so sinking with a moan to her bed after some exhaustion, that moan had shape and told. And in the morning sitting to make up her face by the bedroom mirror with a small horseshoe of naked light bulbs around, she felt at her back a thousand eyes and was poised and carried each motion through to its end with a mind to its uniqueness. Henry was not the kind to see the unseen, he mistook Mina. Mina singing, or flinging out her arms, pirouetting in the room, buying parasols and costumes, imitating to the milkman the milkman’s accent, or just Mina carrying in a dish from the kitchen to the dining-room table, held out high in front of her and she whistling some military march between her teeth and beating time with strange ballet slippers she always wore, it seemed to Henry to be for him. He was uneasy, a little unhappy - should he clap, was there something he had to do, join in or Mina might think he was sulking? There were times, catching Mina’s mood, he did join in, falteringly, in some celebratory manic around the room. Something then in Mina’s eye warned against, said room for one performer only, so he let his steps peter to the nearest chair.

  Sure she worried him, but for the rest she was not unkind, tea was ready in the afternoon when he came in from school, special treats, some favourite, custard cakes or toasted buns, and then the talk. Mina sketched out her day’s impressions and confidences, more wife in these than aunt, talking fast through mouthfuls blowing out crumbs, and made a crescent moon of grease above the upper lip.

  ‘I saw Julie Frank at lunch Three Tuns she was putting them away still living with that jockey or horse-trainer or whatever and not thinking of marriage but she’s a spiteful bitch Henry. “Julie,” I said, “now what of these stories you’re putting out about Maxine’s abortion?” - I told you about that, didn’t I! - “Abortion?” she said, “Oh, that. All fun and giggles, Mina, nothing more.” “Fun and giggles?” I said. “I felt a complete fool when I went round there.” “Oooo, did you now?” she said.’

  Henry ate the eclairs, nodding quietly and liking to sit down after all day at school to listen to a story, Mina told them so well. Then on the second cup of tea it was Henry’s turn to tell his day, more linear and slowly, like this. ‘First we had history and th
en singing and then Mr Carter took us on a walk up Hampstead Hill because he said we were all falling asleep and then it was break and after that we had French and then we had composition.’ But it took longer with Mina breaking in with, ‘History was my favourite subject, I remember …’ and, ‘Hampstead Hill is the highest point in London, you must be careful not to fall off, darling,’ and the composition, the story, did he have it with him? was he going to read it? wait, she must get comfortable first, now go ahead. Making apologies in his mind and very reluctant, Henry brought the exercise book from his satchel, flattened out the pages, began to read, the monotone of a self-conscious robot, ‘No one in the village ever went near the castle on Grey Crag because of the terrible cries they heard at midnight …’ At the end Mina banged the floor with her feet, and clapped, shouted like someone at the back of a hall, lifted high her teacup, ‘We must get you an agent, dear.’ Now it was her turn, she took the story, reading it back with the right pauses and piping howls and rattling spoons for effects, convinced him it was good, even eerie.

  This tea and confession could be two hours; when it was over they went to their rooms, it was dressing for dinner. Later than September Henry found his fire lit a waving glow and writhing furniture shadows on the wall, his suit or costume unfolded on the bed, whichever Mina chose that night for him to wear. Dressing for dinner. It allowed two hours or so for Mrs Simpson to let herself in with her own key, cook the meal and let herself out, Mina to bathe and with black goggles lie beneath her artificial sun, Henry to do his homework, read his old books, play with his old junk. Mina and Henry together found old books and charts in damp bookshops near the British Museum, collected junk from the Portobello Road and Camden market, the we buy and sell everything shops of Kentish Town. A queue of yellow-eyed elephants diminishing, carved in wood, a still working clockwork train of painted tin, puppets with no strings, a scorpion pickled in a jar. And a Victorian children’s theatre giving instructions from a polite booklet for two people to play scenes from the Thousand and One Nights. For two months they pushed the faded cardboard figures across the variable backdrops, you change them with a flick of your wrist, banging knives on teaspoons for sword fights, and Mina got tense crouching on her knees there, angry sometimes when he missed the cue - he often did - but she missed them too, and then they laughed. Mina could do the voices, the villain’s master’s prince’s heroine’s plaintiff’s voices, and tried to teach him how, but uselessly and they laughed again for Henry could do two, a high one and a low one. Mina tired of the cardboard theatre, now only Henry took it out before the fire and, shy, let the figures speak in his mind. Twenty minutes before the dinner he took off his school clothes, washed, took up the costume Mina had planned and joined her in the dining-room where she waited in her costume.

  Mina collected them, costumes, guises, outfits, old clothes, wherever she could get them and she sewed them into shape, packing three wardrobes. And now for Henry too. A few suits from Oxford Street, but the rest unwanted stock, from amateur theatre groups which were folding up, forgotten pantomimes, seconds from the best costumiers, it was her hobby, you see. To dinner Henry wore a soldier’s uniform, and a lift-boy’s from an American hotel before the war, he must be an old man now, a kind of monk’s habit and a shepherd’s smock from the Virgilian Eclogues, performed once and eurhythmically by the girls of the upper sixth, written by or arranged by the head prefect, who Mina was once. Henry was uncurious, obedient, put on each evening what he found at the foot of his bed, and found Mina downstairs in bustle or whalebone hoops, sequined cat suit, or become a Crimean war nurse. But she was not different nor did she play a part to her costume, she made no comment on either’s appearance, seemed in fact to want to forget the matter, eat the meal, relax, drink from the glass her nephew passed her, so he was trained. Henry took the routine, enjoyed the ritual of the long tea and structured privacy, beginning to wonder on the way home from school what was ready for him to wear, hope to find something new on his bed. But Mina was mysterious, not warning over tea of something new, let him discover it and smiled to herself while he mixed her drink and poured himself a lemonade, standing there in a toga she found, toasting with their glasses across the large room, silently. She turned him round, making to herself some note of an alteration, then started the meal, the usual chatter and stories of her days on the stage, or other people’s stories. All so very strange, somehow to Henry ordinary, homely in winter.

  One afternoon retiring after tea, opening the door of his room Henry found a girl lying face down across his bed; stepping a little closer, it was not a girl it was a kind of party frock and a wig of long blonde hair, white tights, black leather slippers. Catching his breath he touched the dress, cold, ominously silky, it rustled when he picked it up, all flounces and frills, layer on layer with white satin and lace edged with pink, a cute bow falling at the back. He let it fall back on the bed, the most girlish thing he ever saw, wiped his hand on his trousers, not daring to touch the wig which seemed alive. Not these, not him, did Mina really want him to? He stared miserably at the bed and picked up the white tights, not these, surely. All right being a soldier, a Roman, a pageboy, something like that, but not a girl, it was wrong to be a girl. Like the best of Henry’s friends at school he did not care for girls, avoided their huddles and intrigues, their whispers and giggles and holding hands and passing notes and I love I love, they set his teeth on edge to see. Unhappily Henry paced the room, sat at his desk to work at memorizing French words, armoire cupboard armoire cupboard armoire cupboard armoire …? and glanced across his shoulder every minute to see if they were still there on the bed, and they were. Twenty minutes to dinner, it could not be right, he could not take his own clothes off or put those on, and yet a terrible thing to upset the ritual of the dressing-up, and now he could hear Mina singing as she left the bathroom, she was doing up her face in the next room. Could he ask to wear something else, when she had been out today to buy him this, when yesterday she told him how good wigs cost and were hard to come by? Sitting on that end of the bed farthest from the clothes and wanting to cry, for the first time in months he missed his mother, solid and always the same, typing at the Ministry of Transport. He heard Mina pass the door going downstairs to wait for him and he began to loosen his shoe and then not, he did not want to. Mina called up to him nothing different in her voice, ‘Henry, darling, are you coming down?’ and he said out loud, ‘Just a moment.’ But he could not move, could not touch those things, did not want to, even if only for pretend, appear a girl. Now there were her footsteps on the stairs, she was coming to see, he pulled one shoe off in token palliation, there was nothing he could do.

  She came into his room dressed, he had not seen her wear it before, an officer’s uniform, brisk, straight-lined, thin buckle epaulettes, and a red stripe in the trousers, her hair pinned back, perhaps it was greased, shiny black shoes, and her face with a man’s heavy lines, the hint of a moustache. She marched across the room, ‘But darling, you haven’t started to get ready yet, let me help you, it will need tying at the back anyway,’ and she began to loosen his tie. Henry stood too numb to resist, she was so certain, pulling off his shirt, trousers, the other shoe, his socks, and then strangely his underpants. Had he washed yet? She took him by the wrist, steered him to the washbasin, was filling it with warm water and flanneling his face, drying it, sweeping him along in a frenzy of her own, a special momentum. He stood naked in the centre of the room in a horror dream while Mina rummaged on the bed among the clothes and found them, turning from the bed with them in her hand, a pair of white knickers, and Henry said ‘No’ to himself as they came towards. Bending down by his feet, ‘Lift one leg,’ she said cheerily and knocked on one foot with the back of her hand, to which he could not stir, just stood, frightened by the edge of impatience in her voice, ‘Come on, Henry, or dinner will be spoiled.’ He moved his tongue before he spoke, ‘No, I don’t want to wear those.’ For a moment her back held there bent over by his feet, then she straightened,
caught his forearm in a pinching mean grip and was looking close in his face, sucking him in with her look. He saw the mask of makeup wadded on, an old man, the lines of frivolous scars and her lower lip stretched with anger across her teeth, first in his legs and then everywhere he began to tremble. She shook his arm, hissed, ‘Lift one leg’, and waited while he made the beginnings of the movement, but that movement released him, let fall a trickle of urine down his leg. She pushed him to the sink again, wiping him quickly with the towel and said, ‘Now’, so that too frightened, too humiliated, to refuse Henry lifted one leg and then the other, submitted to the cold layers of the dress against his skin, lowered over his head, laced from behind, then the tights, the leather slippers, and last the close-fitting wig, the gold hair fell past both his eyes, tumbled freely across his shoulders.

  In the mirror he saw her, a sickeningly pretty little girl, he glanced away and followed miserably Mina downstairs, rustling sulkily and still shaking in his legs. Mina was gay now, she made conciliatory jokes about his reluctance this evening, spoke of a trip somewhere, Battersea funfair perhaps, and even Henry in his confusion knew she was excited by his presence and appearance, for twice in the meal she got up from her place to come to kiss and hug him where he sat and run her fingers through the fabric, ‘All is forgiven, all is forgiven.’ Later Mina drank three glasses of port and sprawled herself in the armchair, a drunken soldier calling to his girl, wanted her to come and sit on this officer’s knee. Henry stayed out of reach, small panics in his stomach at each thought that Mina - was she very wicked or very mad? he could not decide, but for sure the dressing-up game loses its fun by this, he sensed some compulsion in it for Mina, he dared not contradict it, there was something dark - the way she pushed him, the way she hissed, something he did not understand and he pushed it from his mind. So towards the end of the evening, escaping Mina’s hands to pull him on her knee, and catching glimpses of himself in the many mirrors in that room, reflections of the pretty little blonde girl in her party frock, he told himself, ‘It’s for her, it’s nothing to do with anything, it’s for her, it’s nothing to do with me.’