Playing for the Ashes

  So I set about the project and worked like a master at blame and punishment for the next five years.

  OLIVIA

  Chris is back. He’s brought take-away with him, as I thought he might, but it isn’t tandoori. It’s Thai, from a place called Bangkok Hideaway. He held the bag beneath my nose, saying, “Mmmm, smell, Livie. We’ve not tried this yet, have we? They cook peanuts and bean sprouts with the noodles,” and he took it below, through his workroom and into the galley where I can hear him banging crockery about. He’s singing as well. He loves American country western music, and right now he’s doing “Crazy” only slightly less well than Patsy Cline. He likes the part about tryin’ and cryin’. He belts those lines out, and he always makes crazy into three syllables: cuh-RAY-zee. I’m so used to the way Chris sings it that when he plays Patsy Cline on his stereo, I can’t adjust to hearing her instead of him.

  From my spot on the barge deck, I could see Chris coming along Blomfield Road with the dogs. They weren’t running any longer, and from the way Chris was walking, I could tell he was juggling the dogs’ leads, a bag, and something else, which was tucked into the bend of his arm. The dogs seemed interested in this something else. Beans kept trying to jump up to give a look. Toast kept hobbling and nudging Chris’s arm, perhaps in the hope that whatever was there would fall. It didn’t, and when they all came on board—the dogs first, dragging their leads behind them—I saw the rabbit. He was shaking so hard that he looked like a grey and brown blur with floppy ears and eyes that resembled chocolate under glass. I looked from him to Chris.

  “The park,” he said. “Beans routed him from beneath a hydrangea. People make me want to be sick sometimes.”

  I knew what he meant. Someone had got tired of the trouble of a pet and decided he’d be ever so much happier if he was free. Never mind that he wasn’t born wild. He’d get used to it and love it, so long as some dog or cat didn’t get to him first.

  “He’s lovely,” I said. “What shall we call him?”

  “Felix.”

  “Isn’t that a cat’s name?”

  “It’s also Latin for happy. Which I expect he is, now he’s out of the park.” And he went below.

  Chris has just come on deck with the dogs now. He’s got their bowls, and he means to feed them. He usually feeds them below, but I know he wants me to have the company. He puts the bowls near my canvas chair and watches the dogs tuck into their kibble. He stretches, then arcs his arms upward. The late afternoon sunlight makes his head look covered with rust-coloured down. He gazes across the pool to Browning’s Island. He smiles.

  I say, “What?” in reference to that smile.

  He says, “There’s something about willow trees in leaf. Look how the breeze makes the branches sway. They look like dancers. They remind me of Yeats.”

  “And that makes you smile? Yeats makes you smile?”

  “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” he says.

  “What?”

  “That’s Yeats. ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance.’ Appropriate, isn’t it?” He squats by my chair. He notices how many pages I’ve filled. He picks up my tin of those jumbo child’s pencils and sees how many I’ve worn down so far. “Shall I sharpen these up?” is his way of asking how it’s going and if I feel up to continuing.

  My way of saying all right to both is, “Where’ve you put Felix?”

  “On the table in the galley for the moment. He’s having his tea. Perhaps I should check on him. Want to come below?”

  “Not just yet.”

  He nods. He straightens up and when he does my pencil tin rises with him. He says to the dogs, “You lot stay on board. Beans. Toast. D’you hear me? No prowling. You keep an eye on Livie.”

  Their tails wag. Chris goes below. I hear the whirring of the pencil sharpener. I lean back and smile. Keep an eye on Livie. As if I’m going somewhere.

  We’ve developed this peculiar shorthand way of talking, Chris and I. It’s comforting to be able to speak one’s mind without having to touch on the subject. The only problem I find with it is that sometimes I don’t have all the words I want, and the message gets confused. For example, I haven’t yet come up with the way to tell Chris I love him. Not that it would make any difference to our situation if I did tell him. Chris doesn’t love me—not the way one ordinarily thinks of love—and he never has. Nor does he want me. Nor did he ever. I used to accuse him of being queer. Bum-boy, I called him, pansy, ginger beer. And he’d lean forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped beneath his chin, and he’d say earnestly, “Listen to your language of choice. Notice what it says. Don’t you see how that tunnel vision of yours is indicative of a greater ill, Livie? And what’s fascinating is that you’re really not to blame for it. Society’s to blame. For where else do we develop our attitudes if not from the society in which we move?” And my mouth would hang open. I would want to rail. But one can’t fight with a man who doesn’t carry weapons.

  Chris comes back with my pencil tin. He’s brought a cup of tea as well. He says, “Felix has started eating the telephone book.”

  I say, “Good thing I haven’t got anyone to ring.”

  He touches my cheek. “You’re getting chilled. I’ll fetch a blanket.”

  “You needn’t. I’ll want to come below in a while.”

  “But until then…” And he’s gone. He’ll bring the blanket. He’ll tuck it round me. He’ll squeeze my shoulder or perhaps he’ll kiss the top of my head. He’ll direct the dogs to lie on either side of my chair. Then he’ll set out dinner. And when it’s ready, he’ll come for me. He’ll say, “If I may escort Mademoiselle to her table…?” Because escort is part of our shorthand as well.

  The light’s growing dim as we lose the day’s sun, and along the canal I can see reflections in the water from the lamps burning in the other barges. They’re shimmering oblongs the colour of sultanas, and against them the occasional shadow moves.

  It’s quiet. I’ve always found that odd because one would think you’d hear noise from Warwick Avenue, Harrow Road, or either of the bridges, but there’s something about being beneath the roadways that sends sound off in another direction. Chris would be able to explain it to me. I must remember to ask him. If he finds the question odd, he won’t say. He’ll merely look pensive, run a finger through the scrap of hair that curls behind his right ear, and say, “It has to do with the sound waves and the surrounding buildings and the effect of the trees,” and if I look interested, he’ll get out paper and pencil—or take mine from me—and say, “Let me show you what I mean,” and begin to sketch. I used to think that he made up these explanations he seems to have for everything. Who is he, after all? Some skinny bloke with pock-marked cheeks who dropped out of university to “make real change, Livie. There’s only one way to do that, you know. And it has nothing to do with being part of either the structure or the infrastructure keeping the beast alive.” I used to think that anyone who mixed his metaphors like that with so little conscience could hardly be educated enough to know anything, let alone to be part of some great social change in the future. I used to say with great boredom, “I think you mean ‘keeping the building’s foundations sound,’” in an effort to embarrass him. But that was, aside from an obvious need to belittle, the daughter of my mother speaking. My mother who was the English teacher, the illuminator of minds.

  That’s the role Miriam Whitelaw played in Kenneth Fleming’s life at first. But you probably know that already since it’s part of the Fleming legend.

  Kenneth and I are of an age, although I look years older. But our birthdays are actually a week apart, a fact among many that I learned about Kenneth at home over dinner, somewhere between the soup and the pudding. I first heard about him when we were both fifteen. He was a pupil in Mother’s English class on the Isle of Dogs. He lived in Cubitt Town with his parents in those days and what athletic prowess he possessed was demonstrated mostly on the river-damp playing fields of Millwall Park.
I don’t know if the comprehensive had a cricket team. It probably had, and Kenneth may well have played on the first eleven. But if he did, that was part of the Fleming legend that I never heard. And I heard most of it, night after night, with roast beef, chicken, plaice, or pork.

  I’ve never been a teacher, so I don’t know what it is to have a star pupil. And since I was never disciplined enough or interested enough to attend to my studies, I certainly don’t know what it is to be a star pupil and to find a mentor among the instructors who drone endlessly on at the front of the classroom. But that was what Kenneth Fleming and my mother were to each other from the very beginning.

  I think he was what she’d always believed she could find, cultivate, and encourage to grow from the sodden river soil and the dreary council housing that constituted life on the Isle of Dogs. He was the point she had been trying to make with her life. He was possibility personified.

  One week into Autumn term, she began to talk about “this clever young man I’ve got in class,” which is how she introduced him to Dad and me as a regular dinnertime topic. He was articulate, she told us. He was amusing. He was self-deprecating in the most charming of ways. He was completely at ease with his peers and with adults. In the classroom, he had astonishing insight into theme, motivation, and character when they were discussing Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare, Brontë. He read Sartre and Beckett in his free time. At lunch, he argued the merits of Pinter. And he wrote—“Gordon, Olivia, this is what’s so lovely about the boy”—he wrote like a real scholar. He had a questioning mind and a ready wit. He engaged in discussion, he didn’t merely proffer ideas that he knew the instructor wanted to hear. In short, he was a dream come true. And through Autumn, Spring, and Summer terms, he didn’t miss a single day of school.

  I loathed him. Who wouldn’t have done? He was everything I wasn’t and he’d managed it all without having a single Social or Economic Advantage.

  “His father’s a docker,” Mother informed us. She seemed all agog at the fact that the son of a docker could possibly be what she’d always claimed the son of a docker could be: successful. “His mother’s a housewife. He’s the eldest of five children. He gets up at half past four to do his prep for school because he helps with the children at night. He gave the most stunning presentation to the class today. The one I was telling you I’d assigned them on the self. He’s been studying—What is it? Judo? Karate?—and he paced back and forth at the front of the room in that pyjama-thing they wear. He talked about the art and the discipline of mind and then…Gordon, Olivia, he broke a brick with his hand!”

  My father nodded, smiled, and said, “Good Lord. A brick. Fancy that.” I yawned. What a bore it was, she was, he was. The next thing I would learn, no doubt, was that darling Kenneth walked across the Thames without aid of a bridge.

  There was no doubt that he would fly through his O-levels. Or that he’d put his name in lights. He’d make himself the pride of his parents, my mother, and the entire comprehensive. And he’d doubtlessly do it all with one hand tied behind his back, standing on his head in a bucket of vinegar. After which he’d go on to the lower and upper sixth, distinguishing himself in every area possible to a single pupil. After which he’d go to Oxford for a first in an arcane subject. After which he’d bow to civic duty and become prime minister. And through it all, no doubt, the name on his lips most frequently spoken when it came time for acknowledging the secret of his success would be Miriam Whitelaw, beloved teacher. Because she was beloved to Kenneth, my mother. He made her the keeper of the flame of his dreams. He shared with her the intimate parts of his soul.

  That’s why she knew about Jean Cooper long before anyone else did. And we learned about Jean—Dad and I—at the same time as we learned about Kenneth.

  Jean was his girl. She’d been his girl from the time they were twelve-year-olds when having a girl doesn’t mean much more than knowing who’s going to lean against the school-yard wall with whom. She was Scandinavian pretty, with light hair and blue eyes. She was slender like a willow branch and quick like a colt. She looked on the world from an adolescent’s face, but with adult eyes. She went to school only when the mood was upon her. When it wasn’t, she did a bunk with her mates and went through the footway tunnel to Greenwich. When she wasn’t doing that, she’d pinch her sisters’ copies of Just 17 and spend the day reading about music and fashions. She’d paint her face, shorten her skirts, and style her hair.

  I listened to my mother’s tales of Jean Cooper with considerable interest. I knew that if anyone was going to put a cog in the works of Kenneth Fleming’s unstoppable rise to glory, it was going to be Jean.

  From what I gathered over the dinner table, Jean knew what she wanted, and it didn’t have anything to do with O-levels, going on to the lower and upper sixth, A-levels, and university. It did, however, have to do with Kenneth Fleming. At least that’s the way my mother told it.

  Kenneth and Jean both took their O-levels. Kenneth passed his brilliantly. Jean fluffed hers. That outcome was a surprise to no one. But it gratified my mother because I’m sure she believed that the intellectual imbalance in the relationship between Kenneth and his girlfriend would finally become apparent to the boy. Once it was apparent to him, Kenneth would act to remove Jean from his life in order to get on with his education. It’s rather an amusing idea, that, isn’t it? I’m not sure how Mother ever reached the conclusion that relationships between teenagers are about intellectual balance in the first place.

  Jean went from the comprehensive to a job at the old Billingsgate Market. Kenneth went on a governors’ scholarship to a small public school in West Sussex. There he did play on the cricket first eleven, shining so brightly that on more than one occasion scouts from one county side or another stopped by a school match to watch him hit fours and sixes, without apparent effort.

  He came home at weekends. Dad and I heard about this as well because Kenneth always stopped by the comprehensive to give Mother an update on his progress in school. It seems that he played every sport, belonged to every society, distinguished himself in every one of his subjects, endeared himself to the headmaster, the members of the staff, his fellow pupils, his housemaster, the matron, and every blade of grass upon which he trod. When he wasn’t bent upon either achieving greatness or having it thrust upon him, he was home at the weekend, helping out with his brothers and sisters. And when he wasn’t helping out with his brothers and sisters, he was at the comprehensive chatting up Mother and posing as an example, for all the fifth formers, of what a pupil could achieve once he set his sights on a goal. Kenneth’s goal was Oxford, a blue in cricket, a good fifteen years playing for England if he could manage it, and all the benefits that can accompany playing for the England team: the travel, the notoriety, the product endorsements, the money.

  With all this on his plate, Mother concluded happily that he couldn’t possibly have time any longer for “that Cooper creature,” as she called Jean with a curling of her lip. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Kenneth continued seeing Jean in much the same way as he’d been seeing her for the past several years. They merely moved their meetings to the weekend, every Saturday night. They did what they had been doing since they were fourteen years old with two years of getting acquainted behind them: they went to a film or they found a party or they listened to music with some of their mates or they took a long walk or they had dinner with one of their families or they made their way by bus to Trafalgar Square and wandered in the crowds and watched the water stream from the fountains. The prelude never made much difference to what followed, because what followed was always the same. They had sex.

  When Kenneth came to Mother’s classroom that Friday in May of his lower sixth year, her mistake was not giving herself enough time to think the situation through after he told her that Jean was pregnant. She saw hopelessness mix with the shame on his face, and she said the first thing that came into her mind: “No!” And then she followed it up with, “She can’t be. No
t now. It’s not possible.”

  He told her it was. It was far more than possible, in fact. Then he apologised.

  She knew what the apology was going to precede and she sought to head him off, saying, “Ken, you’re upset but you must listen to me. Do you know for certain that she’s pregnant?”

  He said that Jean had told him as much.

  “But have you spoken to her doctor? Has she even seen a doctor? Has she been to a clinic? Has she had a test?”

  He didn’t reply. He looked so miserable that Mother was sure he’d run from the room before she had the chance to clarify the situation. She went hurriedly on. “She may be mistaken. She may have miscounted the days.”

  He said no, there was no mistake. She hadn’t miscounted. She’d told him it was a possibility two weeks ago. The possibility had turned to reality this week.

  Mother rallied carefully with “Is it at all possible that she’s trying to trap you because you’ve been gone and she’s missed you, Ken? The tale of a pregnancy now to get you out of school. A false miscarriage in a month or two should you marry.”

  He said no, that wasn’t it. That wasn’t Jean.

  “How do you know?” Mother asked. “If you haven’t seen her doctor, if you haven’t yet read the results of her test for yourself, how on earth do you know she’s telling you the truth?”

  He said she’d been to the doctor. He’d seen the test results. He was so sorry. He’d let everyone down. He’d let his parents down. He’d let Mrs. Whitelaw and the comprehensive down. He’d let the board of governors down. He’d let—

  “Oh God, you mean to marry her, don’t you?” Mother said. “You mean to leave school, throw everything away, and marry her. But you mustn’t do that.”

  There wasn’t another way, he said. He was equally responsible for what had happened.