Alligator Playground

Ivy

‘IF YOU WERE EVER in love with a man, and that man died while you still loved him, you could only have one love in your life. You’d always remember.’ Ivy knew what she was talking about, because it had happened to her. She meant it to her dying day, yet wondered at the time whether it was herself speaking when she said it.

Ernest Guyler had worked at the same tobacco firm but was forced to stop because he had caught TB. It wasn’t a good place to be when you started to cough. On saying, with a bleak smile of reality that was new to him, that he would most likely never get over it, everybody laughed and told him he would live forever. He knew he wouldn’t, and Ivy saw that he couldn’t, though she joined with the rest of them in saying that he would, because if you loved somebody what else could you say?

‘We never live for life with those we fall in love with,’ one of the women at work told her afterwards, when she was hard enough to comfort.

‘No,’ Ivy answered, ‘but we remember them,’ though she hoped, from the way she felt, that she would not have to go on remembering much longer. The grey-stone parapet of the railway bridge, with a colliery humming and clattering behind, and steel lines multiplying towards Radford station in front, took her so far from grief that she felt frightened of casting herself down into the emptiness after a line of coal trucks shook the world on its way by. Grief came back in the vision of Ernest’s face and, knowing he’d tell her not to be such a fool, she walked down the footway into the field and on towards home.

She couldn’t forget the Sunday afternoons when he had walked up the lane from the railway bridge, after taking the trolleybus from where he lived in Town. Her mother and father were upstairs in bed, and Ivy leaned on the rickety planking of the fence to wait, only her head and two arms showing. There was a reddish tint to her golden hair, tied with a band so that it spread over the shoulders to her full-sleeved dark blue frock. She was the more serious of the blacksmith’s grey-eyed daughters, with an occasional knowing laugh that the others were wary of, for there was a determination behind it that even her father saw as having come more from him than her mother, and so was something to be reckoned with.

A light overcoat would be folded over Ernest’s arm, and she knew there was a white scarf in one pocket in case it turned chilly, and a cap in the other should it rain. On a summer afternoon — the only ones worth recalling — there was a smell of fresh sawdust from the yard, where her father and Dick had worked that morning to make the week’s logs, and a sour odour of bran mash and muck from the stye where the pigs ceaselessly grumbled, as well they might, considering that one of them was to be killed in the autumn.

Ernest was tall and thin, and wore a brown suit, with a collar and tie, and there were three small triangles of white handkerchief showing from the line of his lapel pocket. Dark hair was combed more back than to the side, but was neatly parted. Ivy’s heart bumped when she saw him walking up the lane, eyes in front as if he hadn’t seen her. But she knew he had. They played a game as to who would see who first, and laughed when they decided that neither could ever win.

She ran to meet him for a kiss, uncaring as to who might see, though aware that few would be able to on the sunken lane half obscured by overreaching elderberry bushes, not expecting him to run in his condition, though he did increase his pace.

They walked hand in hand by the house, and then across the field and into Serpent Wood, and she would never forget what took place there, though he always did something so that she wouldn’t have a baby. They were old enough to know better than that, in any case, because it was the nineteen-thirties, and both had been born with the century. On the way back she walked him to the bus stop, the nattily folded handkerchief gone in a good cause from lapel to trouser pocket, their moist hands clasped tightly.

Even her father had little to say against him, which was something of a marvel, because he had snubbed the occasional other she’d had. Perhaps her father didn’t dislike Ernest because he had the same first name as himself; or, as was more likely, he sensed he wouldn’t live long enough to marry her. She could just imagine that. But though her father seemed friendly enough when he met Ernest in the yard, she knew he didn’t like him coming to the door, which was why she leaned over the fence to spot him walking up the lane, and then hurried down to meet him.

Ivy was my aunt, and I recollect everything vividly from those days, some of which was not of course properly understood, since I was only seven or eight at the time. Yet in my heart I feel I know almost as much about her as she did herself, thinking back and putting all the evidence together. She was an aunt who is the ideal mother, no leaden hearts to join, nor even strings attached. The humorous connection of love and trust on both sides was even less complicated because she didn’t have a husband to be wary of, or children of her own.

A great event that she always harped on in after times was that of her giving me, as she said, my first bath. I must have been dipped when newly born, but wouldn’t have remembered that anyway, which therefore couldn’t be proved. One summer’s afternoon, when I was sent to stay because my mother was having another baby, she and her sister Emily chased me around the tree in the yard they said, ‘like a little pink pig that wouldn’t come in to have its throat cut!’

They caught me by the chicken coop, dragged me back kicking, and protesting with all the bad language already picked up (which was a lot, because even then I had a love for words) and plunged me into a large tin bath on the cobbles outside the door. I must have had an occasional soak with my brothers and sisters in front of the fire at home, but this seemed to be my first because the circumstances were so unusual. Not only was the bath for me alone, it was in the open air, fresh air, too, a breeze smelling of leaves and heather, odours soon to be overwhelmed by the smell of the same White Windsor soap that my grandmother used for the weekly wash. By the time my aunts had finished scrubbing me it looked as if they’d also had a bath.

That would have been on a Saturday afternoon, because next day Ivy was standing by the fence looking for Ernest Guyler. Being by her side — there was a log to stand on — I saw him too, and she held my hand on our way down the lane. ‘Come and meet my young man,’ she said, and I could sense her excitement, and also that of Ernest when he put a hand on my shoulder and said how big I was for my age but all the time looking into Ivy’s eyes.

He took out a packet of Players and gave me the cigarette card. Because he’d bought them from a machine there was a ha’penny as change in the shilling packet. He held the coin between his fingers. ‘Heads or tails?’

‘Neither,’ I told him.

‘It’s yourn, then.’ He gave it to me, and laughed, though his brown eyes didn’t.

He offered Ivy a fag and, ill though he looked, smoked one himself as they walked towards the field. Ivy called that I should go back into the house, where Emily would look after me, but I stood on a stone looking at the three pigs, now and again aiming a bit of coal to hear them grunt, until the stench made my eyes run, when I went into the house to annoy the cat.

The loss of Ernie Guyler wasn’t the end of Ivy’s life. She did go out with a few men during the War, once with an American soldier, who gave me some chewing gum when I met them on the street, but none of them were considered up to much, or they went abroad and were never heard from again, so she stayed on at the small house in Town where her parents had moved, with her sister Emily who hadn’t married either.

When she was sixty, and her parents had been dead ten years, I heard her laughingly tell my mother that she felt only half her age, and in many ways she looked it. That was when she met Albert Jones, a small thin man of sixty-five who had just retired after a lifetime’s work on the railway. If he reads this story I hope he will recognise himself, though it’s unlikely he’s alive. I don’t think he’s capable of reading anyway, but if he is soldiering on I’m sure he’s still puffing at his foul tobacco and putting back his daily quart, the only habit which could keep him going.

Ivy met him in the Boulevard Hotel, a glorified pub really, not far from the house, on what must have been the worst day of her life, though she wasn’t to know that for some time. She had called at the bar with her sister, and Albert happened to be standing there. It was a Friday, some time in the late fifties, and he wore his suit. Wavy grey hair, thinning compared to what it had once been, gave him a staid aspect, only belied by the light in his eyes which Ivy mistook, fatally, for a sense of mischief and fun.

He told them his wife had died only a year ago. ‘I buried her, and if you’ll marry me, duck, I’ll bet a quid I’ll bury you, as well!’

‘I suppose you say that to everybody, you cheeky devil.’

‘To every nice lass, I do.’

‘Anyway, you don’t look strong enough to lift a spade,’ Ivy said, ‘never mind bury anybody. You’d sprain your wrist.’

‘Not bad enough to pick this up, though,’ he said, lifting his newly drawn pint. He knew himself for a bit of a card, and was so full of conviction he could see her thinking so as well.

He made sure always to be there when Ivy went in for her weekend drink, and after a month of falsely charming banter asked her to marry him, making sure the light went out of his eyes so that she would see he was serious.

Nobody had asked her since Ernie Guyler, who had died before she could. She had never wanted to marry after that. Going out with a man now and again was one thing, but to live with one after a lifetime being bossed by her father, no thank you. She had her job, a house, and her sister to look after. So why did she say yes?

My mother told her she ought to have more sense, but three months later they were married at the registry office. ‘Aren’t you being a bit of a fool, Ivy?’ she heard a voice say during the ceremony.

‘It’s all right for you, Ernie, but you’re dead, and I’ve got to go on living.’

Albert was about to put the ring on her finger. ‘Who was you talking to?’

‘Nobody. My lips must have moved.’

‘I thought it was pigeons warbling.’

‘Come on, let’s get on with it.’

She found out later that Albert had been living with his sister, and had tormented her so much she told him to pack his tranklements and go, into lodgings for all she cared, because she wouldn’t put up with his selfish ways anymore. Her name was Hilda and she came to the wedding, but hardly spoke to Ivy, kept a tight lip as if, should she say much, a quarrel might ensue and Albert would go home with her.

He must have thought he would have the time of his life with two women to wait on him, but Emily liked the new arrangement less and less. She never said so, but Albert knew it, and begin to mock her slow ways. Emily had always been the backward girl of the family, and her mother before dying made Ivy vow to look after her. Ivy would never have thought that getting married would make it such a hard promise to keep.

‘You get on my nerves,’ Albert would begin.

‘And you get on mine,’ Emily snapped back.

‘Why don’t you go out for a walk?’

‘I don’t want to. Why don’t you?’

He mimicked her in baby talk. ‘Why don’t you?’

‘This is as much my house as yours.’

We’ll see about that, his grin seemed to say.

‘Leave her alone,’ Ivy said.

Instead of two women waiting on him hand and foot, they combined to turn against him, he thought, and such venomous resentment he hadn’t bargained for. Ivy was appalled at the infantile way he carried on, which brought out more childishness in Emily and, God knows, Ivy thought, she had enough as it was. Even she didn’t always like it, but Albert made it worse. When she told him this he either asked her not to interfere, or acted as if he didn’t know what she was talking about, which made Ivy doubt her own grown-up judgement, though never for long.

Instead of having one old age pension to play around with, he soon had three. The house cost only twelve shillings a week, and he took charge of the rent book. Payments were often in arrears; they didn’t need to be, but he did it to keep Ivy in a state of worry. He often went out to the pub and came back drunk, though most nights he sat by the fire watching television. Ivy and Emily liked to smoke a cigarette now and again, but Albert’s continual puffing of his vile brand of tobacco made them complain of the stink.

I was in Nottingham for a few days, and knew my aunts would be glad to see me for half an hour. It was some time in the sixties, when I was always glad to get out of London and back in the steadier, certainly less frenetic life, of my birth-town. Knocking at the back door, I walked in without waiting for an answer, being one of the family. In the big pocket of my overcoat was a half bottle of whisky for my aunts — I knew they liked a drink — and a tin of the better sort of tobacco for Albert.

They didn’t seem happy but then, would they be able to show it even if they were? Happy wasn’t much of a word in their dictionary, nor in mine, for that matter, and though I didn’t particularly like Albert, if I had known how he behaved to my aunts, and how they detested him for it, I would have liked him even less. I knew something wasn’t right between them, but hoped the tobacco would put him in a better mood.

It was obvious though that Ivy had got herself into a lobster pot of a marriage, and I thought maybe it would cheer her up to talk of old times and the people we had known. Her hands shook as if she had some kind of palsy. She wasn’t well, and it was only too plain that Albert didn’t care, that he even resented it. When she asked if I wanted a cup of tea I told her I’d just had a bucketful at home. It amused her to hear me go from London talk back to my rough childhood voice.

‘I met Ernie Guyler yesterday, up Radford Woodhouse.’ The words were impulsively out. ‘Do you remember him?’

Her grey eyes looked straight at me, hands seeming to shake less. ‘Oh yes, I do.’

‘I liked him, because when I was a kid he used to give me cigarette cards, and the ha’penny from the packet of Players fags.’

She sat down, a hand quickly over her cheek. Albert turned to the fire because he could make nothing of our talk. I looked around the room to see all the objects of my grandparents, remembered from when they had lived at the cottage: the pot dogs with such benign almost human faces on the shelf which I supposed were valuable antiques by now, my grandfather’s showcase of the last half dozen horseshoes, the stacked tea services of my grandmother in the glass-fronted cupboard, and many other tasteful gew-gaws hardly seen anymore, each a solid memory for me, but an eternal veil of protection for Ivy and Emily who had known them from birth.

‘Ernest Guyler used to take me rabbiting,’ I went on. ‘I’ll always remember him. He’s still thin, and coughs a bit.’

‘He’ll never alter,’ Ivy said with a smile. ‘I know he won’t, not Ernie.’

‘He was walking under that railway bridge towards Old Engine Cottages where grandad and grandma lived.’

She was hardly able to speak. ‘Was he?’

Albert turned. ‘He sounds nowt but a bleddy owd poacher to me.’

‘What do yo’ know about it?’ My tone was so hard that the light of unassailable malice went from his eyes, because he knew that as old as he was I would have thumped him if he’d said much more. Yet I knew enough as not to anger him in case he took it out on Ivy after I’d gone, even though I’d kept the tobacco in reserve so that he would feel jollier when I had.

Ivy winked at me, and smiled again, and when I said I had to be going gave me two passionate kisses, a good one for myself and loving one for Ernest Guyler, or so I wanted to think.

The next time I called she was obviously ill. So was I, not in my body, of course, but from some bleak misery or other, locked up in a life she could know nothing about, and which I shouldn’t have been in at all but was, and which she would certainly have laughed at as being of no consequence.

She should have been in bed, but wasn’t, coming from a family where bed was something you got to exhausted in order to sleep until getting up next morning to work — or to die. Her hands shook as she lit a cigarette. For me to help would have been an insult. ‘I’ve just come out of hospital,’ she said, adding it was the first time she had been in such a place. ‘But I’ll be all right now.’

Albert took his tin of tobacco, his claw reaching out, and gave no thanks, because he knew that to do so would be a compliment to Ivy for having such a generous nephew. I’d got his number all right, but to throttle him would only make it worse for Ivy, and Emily.

In spite of her affliction she made me a cup of tea, and while Albert was down in the cellar filling a bucket of coal for the dying fire she looked at me with her grey eyes shimmering with tears and said: ‘Alan, take me away with you. I can’t stand him or this anymore.’

Then she smiled, as if to inform me that she knew it could only be a joke, giving me the opening I both wanted and had to have, and smile in turn as if to agree that I knew she didn’t mean it, that the notion of me going back to London with an ailing seventy-year-old woman was out of the question — knowing that she knew but that having said it was all she had wanted to do, to see what I replied, and knowing that at least I thought of the right answer and was troubled by saying what I did which proved enough that I loved her. Because of course she couldn’t uproot herself and come with me to my uncertain life, even if I’d pleaded that she should.

But I wish I’d spontaneously said yes, please come, I’ll look after you, thus giving her the chance to turn me down. It was one more betrayal in my life, one more solid trail of anguish fading into the rear horizon that will dog me to the end, but another zenith of self interest because guilt and anguish of that sort are necessary motors to keep me going.

‘No,’ Emily said, ‘he can’t,’ as if to add, though it wasn’t necessary either to Ivy or to me, ‘What will happen to me if you go?’

Albert came up with the coal and put a lump onto the fire, and I said I must be going. She died a couple of years later, and I didn’t go to the funeral because I was away in some foreign country or other. I tried to imagine Emily stuck in that house with Albert when I heard the news, and can only think it must have been the worst cat-and-dog situation. However it was, conveniently for him, she had a heart attack on coming out of church one evening, while crossing the road and making for the pub on the opposite corner.

I called on Albert some time later, and he hadn’t changed. He barely mentioned Ivy, though I talked about her. I thought such lack of interest meant he was going ga-ga — he certainly wasn’t grief-stricken — but at eighty he was still healthy, well able to look after himself, and smoking his pipe all the time.

The house was condemned by the council, the mangonels of synthetic modernisation on the march, and Albert had to leave. It was still a good house, solid enough in structure, but thousands were being demolished when they only needed a bathroom above the scullery for them to last another seventy years. High rise hen-coops were deemed to be the order of the day by those who would never have to live in them but had decided that that was how the ‘working classes’ ought to want to live.

Albert had talked his way into living again with his sister Hilda, in a village thirty miles away, and when she threw him out for the second time, as no doubt she would, he’d become the Hitler of the old folks’ home and live comfortably to the end.

Before the house was knocked down I went to have one last look. There were boards at the windows, but I went up the yard to the back door and kicked it in. The place was empty, yet clean and neat still, as if only waiting for the next tenants to move in with their furniture.

I stood for a moment in the front bedroom, in which both my grandparents had died, and Ivy also, the same paper on the walls, then stepped across the narrow landing to the other bedroom, also empty. I wondered what Albert had done with the furniture, and all of my aunts’ possessions. He couldn’t have taken it to his sister’s, or to an old folks’ home. He had obviously sold it, and pocketed the bit of money the junk man had thought to give him. What about the tea service, and my grandfather’s horseshoes? He’d had his own way, but there was no one to blame but myself.

Traffic streamed inconsequentially by along the road and, turning from the window, I noticed a piece of screwed up paper on the floor, the only sign of untidiness. I picked it up, and slowly unfolded it from the tight ball.

If he had been in the house just then I would have bludgeoned that smile from his face, killed him no less, or threatened him to death. The paper was the marriage certificate of himself and Ivy and, before departure, his last act had been to throw it away, and leave it behind like a piece of rubbish.

I couldn’t imagine where he had got such spite, what he’d had in him to hate her, why he was so rotten as not to put up with the best qualities a woman ever had. He must have known that he had none by comparison, but you might have thought, after she was dead, he would realise that people living together have much to put up with from each other, and that forgiveness is all.

I walked out with the certificate carefully folded in my pocket, wondering about the one big mistake in Ivy’s life and, on the train back to London, speculating on the fact that so many people make at least one.