Lizzie Vogel 1 - Man at the Helm

4

In the post-mortem following Mr Lomax’s visit my sister and I were self-critical and rightly so. Our aim had been that they should have a drink and then have sex in her sitting room and do it enough times until they got engaged and then married. But we’d let him slip through our fingers with bad planning and shoddy execution.

And though we agreed Mr Lomax wasn’t the ideal, we evaluated our efforts as if he had been, even though he most definitely hadn’t. It had been a mistake, we agreed, not to have offered any snacks or put on any music, and this might have led to Mr Lomax feeling uncomfortable and probably peckish and if there was one thing I knew for definite about men it was that they cannot perform sex if hungry. We also agreed that doing the play had only made things worse – especially that particular scene with Debbie and her being a bugger to lift. It wasn’t surprising that it freaked him out.

We didn’t let it put us off, though. My sister consulted the Man List, crossed off Mr Lomax and added Bernard, our father’s chauffeur. I objected, saying he and our mother hated each other’s guts, but my sister mentioned the very fine line between love and hate (i.e., that you’re more likely to want to have sex with and marry someone you hate than someone you don’t care one way or the other about). Which, when I thought about it for long enough, made sense. Worryingly.

With that in mind we added a semi-retired mechanic called Denis who offered a taxi service in his Ford Zodiac – whom our mother also hated.

I wondered if it might be simpler just to instigate a reunion with our father. My sister disagreed. In her opinion they were still chalk and cheese. Also, he’d begun to fade as a notion. It was the way with divorced fathers in those days. They tended to keep out of the picture from sheer politeness and convenience. Ditto non-divorced fathers, except with divorced ones you actually never saw them except for the odd Sunday lunch or to trudge across a field with a picnic. They were absent from your private life and this was hard on leftover boys like Little Jack because there was no man at home to show them how to make the noise of an explosion or tell them that West Germany were better than Ecuador. Not that our particular father would have been able to do either of those, but it was the principle of the thing. And, worse than that, they were absent from your public life, never attending parents’ evenings, sports days, school plays, and never seeing nature displays or topic books. They never saw you perform, excel, try, succeed, fail, and this was hard on my sister because it meant he never got to hear about her extraordinary cleverness in school and therefore couldn’t possibly admire her as much as he should. She did occasionally tell him about it but it always sounded boastful and far-fetched and it sickened all concerned, so she stopped.

I was the least bothered by our father’s private and public absence. Probably because I was certain he’d have been a fine father if it hadn’t been for the divorce. I somehow didn’t need his reminders to save lolly sticks in case of a sudden urge to make a model of Leicester prison as he had done as a boy (albeit with matchsticks). I had a good memory and had heard plenty of his advice on life. Neither did I need his seal of approval. I just happened to think that, compared with everyone else on offer, he was the nicest and the best and, more importantly, the wellest known. He remained on the Man List, theoretically, but (before you get any ideas) there was never a romantic remarriage, there wasn’t even a try-out; we decided it was all just too tangled and unlikely, not to mention the travel.

For the time being though, we decided we shouldn’t invite any of the other men on the list to meet our mother until we’d done more research and honed a routine. In the meantime we devised some in-between projects to cheer her up and hopefully prevent the writing of the play. My sister’s ideas were quick fixes – getting another foal or going to the theatre fifteen miles away or building a feed-shed. She even toyed with the idea of pretending something really bad had happened and then saying it was a false alarm so our mother could experience the sense of intense relief that makes a person count their blessings. But I thought it risky.

I preferred longer projects with multiple outcomes – planting a line of poplar trees like they have in France as a barrier against strong, hot winds, for instance, or trying to befriend someone like Mrs C. Beard across the road, who seemed like the only nice person in the village and who told us off for littering but only if we were littering, and if we weren’t she’d smile and sometimes even wave for some reason.

My best idea, though, bearing in mind our mother’s underweightness, was a cookery spree, seeing as we were sick of toast and parsley sauce anyway. My sister considered all my ideas either too ambitious or ‘unlikely to bear fruit’, meaning they might never make it out of the idea stage. Or, in the case of the cookery spree, too unrealistic, seeing as our mother hated food almost as much as she hated the chauffeur (her worst word in the English language being ‘portion’).

And my sister, being far more practical than me, came up with a good and simple idea, which she introduced so naturally I hardly noticed it when it popped out. We were in our mother’s bedroom. She had a heavy four-poster bed with ugly drapes and a few pieces of awkward walnut heartwood furniture whose open-grained appearance I hated and which I would have painted a pretty greeny-blue. We liked being in her bedroom nevertheless. It smelled nice and had a feeling of things before the split – the same linens, the same little bottles of scent etc. She even had her Ophelia in oils hanging above a cold hearth. Other old paintings had been dumped in the loft and replaced by abstract shapes in orange and yellow and quaint old signs from market stalls advertising motor oils and digestive powders.

‘I think we should start going to church,’ my sister said, looking into our mother’s magnified eyes via the dressing table mirror. (That was her good and simple idea.)

I spoke up in surprised agreement – reminding them both that the church, being handily situated across the road, would be easy to get to. Our mother didn’t respond for a while. She looked as if she were preparing to leave the house – a drop of Eyedew in each eye and pale lipstick dragged across her stretched lips. She didn’t use much make-up, preferring to look natural. Her hair was plain and long, and her brown face was bony and scattered with a few tiny square freckles which looked like pieces of a broken plant pot. She was uncluttered, which I thought impressive when so many others were so done up.

‘You can go to church if you want,’ she said eventually, with a sniff of sarcasm, gazing at herself.

‘No, I meant us as a family,’ said my sister, ‘to get to know people in the village.’

‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in the place,’ said our mother, ‘not after the visit from that idiotic little vicar, and his ridiculous little speech.’

‘What did he say?’ I asked.

‘He said we were more than welcome at church,’ said our mother, ‘but I wouldn’t be permitted to join the Mothers’ Union on account of being divorced.’

‘Well, then, we’re “more than welcome” – we should go,’ I said, opening my hands in a gesture that means ‘you see’, which was funny because it looked like a prayer book.

‘No, Lizzie, when people say you’re “more than welcome” it means you’re not welcome at all,’ said our mother.

‘Does it? What do they say if you are welcome, then?’ I asked.

‘They don’t say anything,’ she said, ‘you just know.’

My sister looked a bit crestfallen, her idea having been so thoroughly rejected, but then Little Jack piped up with an idea, which was strange because we never included him in our planning, him being a worrier and too young for the whole truth. It just showed how clever and perceptive he was. And not only did he have an idea, he had a leaflet about it.

Little Jack’s leaflet gave details of the Easter Fancy Dress Parade and he was very proud of it. Jack was not interested in the parade per se, but loved waving the leaflet around. He always picked up leaflets. They weren’t as prevalent then as nowadays and there was some novelty value, if you can believe it. And he was particularly pleased with this one because of getting so much attention for it – that being the purpose of most things with youngests.

We followed our mother downstairs and huddled together on the chesterfield at the chilly end of the kitchen and discussed the parade and the fancy dress competition. Our mother wasn’t going out after all: she was writing a one-act play called The Female Vixen about the wife of a huntsman who tames a wild fox just to prove she can and is then stuck with a tame fox that can’t ever be returned to the wild and gets addicted to Shredded Wheat. Which sounded quite exciting.

The thing was, though, by the time that leaflet appeared my sister and I had already grown to hate the village and I am not keen on villages to this day. Having said that, I must also admit that more than anything I wanted us to fit in and belong and be liked by the village. The tiniest gesture of friendship, however lukewarm, would have made things seem so much better and I was quite prepared to do whatever necessary to be included.

In theory you could join one of the village clubs or groups and there were some good ones, only you needed to be nominated, seconded or have your name reach the top of a list and therefore you were always at the mercy of someone in charge. For example, our mother tried to join the choir but was told it was full of sopranos like her and they’d contact her when someone died or lost their voice or got ill. My sister – a true bird lover – was keen to join the Young Ornithologists but she was too old for the juniors (eleven) as they were full except for under-eights, but when Little Jack said perhaps he’d join and we rang the man, suddenly the under-eights had become the under-sevens and therefore he was too old too.

In reality – apart from going to church, which had been ruled out because of the idiotic little vicar saying we were ‘more than welcome’ and our mother having the intelligence to translate it into its true meaning – opportunities to join in were fairly limited and depended on already being happily integrated. However, the Easter Fancy Dress Parade was open to all and something we could join in with no waiting list, hoops or hurdles.

‘The judges will be particularly looking for unusual and timely home-made costumes,’ Little Jack read out in his machine-gun voice.

I say ‘no hoops or hurdles’ though there was the small hurdle of my sister and me deploring those kinds of things (fancy dress parades). She, because she hates being on display, and me, because I hate it that you only win if you’re in a brilliant costume and it’s quirky and timely and you need to have a quirky, timely idea and still have the time and materials and skill to produce the costume itself. Or a mother who will. And it’s always the same lucky few who can rise to the occasion, when actually it would be nice if someone else won for a change.

My sister refused to even consider dressing up and I’d almost given up on it when our mother came up with a quirky idea that was so brilliant and timely I almost fainted and thought I must be dreaming. I honestly think it was the best idea she’d ever had or ever would have. Even she said so. It was better than the award-winning play she had written in 1957. Better because that was just an accident and this was a good idea and they’re almost impossible to have. I was to be Miss Decimal.

Our mother set to work and got the whole outfit made in an hour. A plain white crêpe-paper dress with a giant Bacofoil-covered cardboard fifty-pence piece stuck on to the front of it. The idea was so up-to-the-minute it was still in the news even. Decimalization had only occurred in the February and there I’d be, on Easter Monday, a walking, talking fifty-pence piece. I felt sure this parade would be the start of our being embraced by the community, not least because of our mother’s fantastic and timely decimal idea, but also its simplicity and lack of ostentation.

I made this observation and badgered my sister to agree, which she did reluctantly, and our mother offered to construct a simple outfit for my sister called the Divorce Reform Act, which had also come into effect that year and would therefore be timely (and home-made).

‘What would the Divorce Reform Act look like?’ I asked, feeling slightly that it might trump Miss Decimal.

After a few moments our mother said, ‘I’d start with a simple calico dress, pin-tucked at the bust and embroidered with words of love and bound with a red sash. But the skirt would be rudely shredded and the embroidery unpicked with threads hanging …’

‘And the hair all messy and smudged mascara,’ I added.

‘No thanks,’ my sister interrupted.

Little Jack decided that he’d like to enter the parade, but not as the Divorce Reform Act and our mother, being in the right mood, got to work on a simple John Lennon outfit.

The day of the parade dawned and Jack and I got into our costumes and trotted hand in hand to the vicar’s garden by the church. Mrs Longlady, our almost neighbour, was one of the judges and she spoke into a microphone to the entrants and their mothers. Seeing her there in her role as boss of the village, she seemed tall and important – like her name. And she kept saying ‘thrice’, which seemed important too. I’d never before heard anyone say ‘thrice’ and it became my favourite word.

‘The entrants will be viewed thrice,’ she announced to the entrants and their mothers in her echoey mic voice, ‘walking, standing and close up, before we adjudge who is to be awarded the prizes.’

I was in the under-twelves class and we were the first to be looked at. We had gathered in a huddle under the chestnut tree and a helper came along and unhuddled us so that the judges could view us (thrice). I was bang in the middle of the line. To my left was Bo-Peep with a fluffy sheep under her arm and to my right a boy in his swimming trunks with a flap who I guessed was Mowgli. I tried to talk to my fellow contestants, but they turned away from me when I spoke. A couple of them smirked at my costume and one said, ‘What’s she come as?’ and another answered, ‘Ten bob!’ and the whole line laughed.

Then the judges, Mrs Longlady, Mrs Worth from the toy and hardware shop, and Mrs Frink from the hunt, came along and looked thrice at Bo-Peep, smiled and asked if she’d helped her mum make the costume and if she’d lost her sheep. They walked straight past me. They didn’t look once, let alone thrice.

They didn’t smile or say what a clever idea. They didn’t ask if I’d made the costume myself. Neither did they look carefully at my clogs, on to which we’d stuck plastic coins, even though I waggled them a bit to draw attention to them. Partly they just didn’t like me – me being me and a member of a family with no man at the helm. But equally they hated decimalization and saw it as a nuisance foisted on them by London, a no-good, pointless change they’d never asked for. They were angry about the rounding-up of the ha’penny or the rounding-down of it. Shopkeepers like Mrs Worth felt the shopkeeper was losing out and wives like Mrs Longlady felt the housewife was being cheated. And there I was, the living personification of the thing. Bacofoil-covered.

They didn’t even look; they glanced, winced and moved straight on to Mowgli. Mrs Worth mistook him for an American swimmer called Mike and complained that there hadn’t been a single medal for Britain in the 1968 Olympic Games. Mowgli explained he was Mowgli and, looking thrice or more, the judges adored him, said how much they loved The Jungle Book and so on.

A mermaid in a bikini top won first prize. She had a padded tail, the flipper end being her out-turned feet. Her bikini top was two of those shell ashtrays that are thoughtfully placed in the waiting areas of takeaway restaurants and never quite come clean in the washing-up due to the ridges. Anyway, she won, though I couldn’t see how it was timely. Still, the judges liked the bikini top and the clever use of a wheelchair borrowed from the Pines old people’s home.

Soon the younger class was all lined up on a platform, the committee thinking, rightly, that the audience particularly like to see the little ones in costume. Little Jack was King Farouk of Egypt, which wasn’t quite so timely and up-to-the-minute as Miss Decimal, Farouk having stopped reigning twenty years beforehand and gone into exile, but Little Jack had been given a fez by our much-travelled father. And on seeing the fez, the image of King Farouk popped into our mother’s head and she switched him from the planned John Lennon with the wire-rimmed specs to the well-known, albeit old and probably dead Egyptian king. Little Jack was fine about it. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a king?

Little Jack didn’t appreciate the close-up part of the thrice viewing and kept edging away from the judging trio until he fell off the platform and his fez rolled away in circles like a dropped toffee. And though Little Jack didn’t win his class, the judges didn’t totally ignore him either, especially after his tumble. They loved his little curled-up moustache and the fez (which everyone was captivated by) and they loved laughing at his foreignness of course. Plus he was little and a boy and so had that bit more going for him. In fact, the judges pulled him forward with another younger Bo-Peep and Jiminy Cricket (both in costumes hired from Pinocchio’s in Leicester) and for a moment it really looked as if Jack might get a rosette – the judges were pointing at him (him looking so podgy with his cushion tummy and regal with his recovered fez at a funny angle). Then, at the last minute, Mrs Longlady asked, ‘Are you King Hussein of Jordan?’ and Little Jack shook his head and the audience laughed and Mrs Longlady said, ‘Well, who are you, then? Could you tell us, please?’ and Little Jack stammered, froze on the K and looked desperate, so I rushed forward in my crêpe dress and explained that he was actually King Farouk of Egypt, now deceased, and they laughed again.

With that information, the judges shooed Little Jack back into the line and beckoned forward Lady Godiva and she got the rosette for third place. They were most tickled (Mrs Longlady’s words) by the use of the real-live pony and the flesh-coloured body-stocking. And that was doubly galling because we’d said we should not involve our ponies, due to a family rule about not seeming ostentatious.

It would have (might have) changed everything if Little Jack had won that yellow rosette. We might have felt differently about the village. I think we would. But he didn’t and we didn’t and we trudged home and I went upstairs and looked in the mirror and felt utterly bereft and humiliated. I didn’t dramatize it. I didn’t stamp on my fifty-pence piece or rip it to shreds. I was mature for my age: I made a cup of tea and said what bitches the judges were and Little Jack nodded.

Our mother was bitterly disappointed. I say bitterly because it goes so well with the word disappointed. In fact she was just a bit disappointed and annoyed and like me thought the judges were bitches, especially the way they snubbed me in my decimal outfit, it being such a timely idea.

My sister said we’d been fools to enter and that we’d both looked ridiculous and she’d been ashamed. I loved her then. I knew she’d always be honest with us and it was most reassuring, her scathing response being a silver lining of sorts.

Our mother’s play about the parade was the least entertaining she’d ever written.

Judge: So, what have you come as?

Adele: I’m the village.

Judge: But you look like a distressed high-court judge.

Adele: It’s my interpretation of the village.

Judge: Is the costume home-made and timely?

Adele: Yes, except for the periwig, which I borrowed.

Judge: Make sure to return it.

All that entering fancy dress parades had got us nowhere with our quest and nowhere else besides and we decided it was time to crack on. So we were discussing the Man List one day with some urgency – the relative merits of Bernard the chauffeur and Mr Oliphant the local farmer type (though not an actual farmer) – and racked our brains for more candidates – when our mother drifted into the kitchen in a caramel dress of an almost triangular shape that ended below the knee in a sharp point. She wore it with a metal belt and white sandals and looked like a slice of Portuguese pudding in two shades of sugary brown and a three-pronged fork on a thin white plate. We asked where she was going and she said she was going to see Dr Kaufmann again to get a prescription for a few pills to make her feel better, and strode off as quickly as the narrow skirt would allow.

A few pills to make her feel better: it sounded like such a brilliant idea that when she slammed the door behind her, I punched the air. It was a simple solution to all our problems (and so much easier than painting furniture or traipsing off to church once a week) and it meant we might not have to pull the next ideas out of our metaphorical sleeves.

My sister said we shouldn’t get carried away because even if the pills came up trumps we’d still desperately need a man at the helm in order to regain a few shreds of respect – however happy or normal our mother became.

‘We need a man, Lizzie, and until we find one, we’re as good as lepers,’ she said.

Little Jack pressed his face against the window. ‘Where’s Mum gone?’ he asked, and started banging on the window after her. She always forgot to tell him things, and so did we, and he was often left in the dark or banging on windows.

‘She’s just gone to get some pills from Dr Kaufmann,’ I said, ‘to make her feel better.’

And feeling a bit better ourselves we made a jug of Lemfizz – our special secret drink that used to be banned by Mrs Lunt for making a sticky mess and making us do sick burps, both of which she hated.

To show that I appreciated the limited expectation of the pills, I joined my sister in looking at the Man List and tried to think up new men for our soon-to-be-happier mother and, inspired by the Lemfizz, we suddenly remembered the idiotic little vicar whom our mother detested. Recalling the fine line between love and hate previously mentioned, we added him to the list of men and said he’d be next.

I must admit the idea of the pills made the Man List seem less important to me. I felt sure they were going to do us all a power of good and in spite of my sister’s words I thought we might not even need the list. I had one more attempt at coaxing my sister round to my view, but she gave me a look of disappointment and spoke to me gravely.

‘How many times do I have to tell you, Lizzie?’ she asked. ‘The pills are not a substitute.’

She looked hard at me for my response. ‘Right,’ I said, ‘but they should make her feel better, shouldn’t they?’

‘Yes, they should. But feeling better can become a problem in itself, feeling better can become the problem.’

‘But if they make her feel better … that’s good, isn’t it?’ I said, feeling a bit exasperated by the whole thing, to be honest.

‘They might make her feel too better,’ explained my sister, ‘so much better that she loses the will to even find a man. That’s why she’s going to need so much help from us.’

‘Too better?’

‘Yes, too better, too happy, drugged.’

‘I see,’ I said, though I couldn’t imagine why that would be a problem.

It sounded like happiness to me.

OK. I tried to put the pills right out of my mind and to stop being so optimistic. And when our mother returned from the doctor, having come home via Mr Blight the pharmacist, I didn’t even mention them, and when she put them on the sideboard I looked away and focused only on the Man List.

‘Why do you hate the vicar so much?’ I asked.

‘I don’t hate him,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he’s a perfectly good man if he’d just be himself and speak openly and stop being such a prat.’

I know she was only being nice about him because she was happy to have the pills all ready to go. Who knows, maybe she’d already taken one or two.

I wrote to the vicar with my sister’s blessing.

Dear Reverend Derek,

You may have noticed that I have not been attending church. The reason for this is that I’m questioning organized religion and can’t stand all the idiots in church. I still pray but privately in my nightie at bedtime.

Added to which, I’ve heard that due to my divorced status I need the Bishop’s permission to take communion and that has made me feel quite rejected. It’s imperative that I evaluate God in my life. If you have time one day, please could you drop in to openly and naturally discuss the God and church aspect with me.

All good wishes,

Elizabeth Vogel

And delivered it by hand. The vicar knocked on the door the very next day and was invited in for a cup of coffee. He took it milky.

I saw this as a sign of his keenness on our mother, though my sister thought not. She explained that vicars always rush round to anyone showing even the slightest flicker of interest in God these days before they change their mind again. She, my sister, had begun to lose her faith around that time, having just reached the age of doubting everything. And according to her, half the world was teetering on the brink of disbelief because of the Beatles and the kind of pills our mother was taking.

Whatever the reason for his speedy response, the vicar appeared and, to our amazement, they seemed to have sex that very day. And from the noises the reverend made he either really liked it or it was physical agony. This began an affair that lasted thirteen days. He never stayed longer than an hour and always insisted on talking about spirituality and so forth and she’d always drift off during that part. We didn’t always see him because we might be at school, but I kept tabs on it via asking our mother plenty of questions.

‘Did that vicar come round?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long was he here?’

‘An hour-ish.’

‘That’s not long for discussing God.’

‘He’s got the rest of his flock to see to.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘God mostly.’

‘Was it nice, having him to visit?’

‘Not particularly.’

Soon the vicar’s wife called and she and our mother had a heated discussion which included the vicar’s wife saying, ‘Hang on just a minute, you invited him.’

To which our mother responded, ‘No, I did not.’

Which was both true and yet not true, and my sister and I saw the flaw in our system. We cringed and looked at each other, expecting the vicar’s wife to produce the letter I’d written to her husband, but she didn’t, which was a huge relief and we both thanked God.

And the vicar didn’t come round again. He’d been a waste of time and our mother hadn’t taken to him. But, we had to admit, there’d been no play-writing at all during the fortnight of sex with the reverend. A short act appeared afterwards, though.

Rev. Hope: Why do you want to pray alone and not with the rest of the flock?

Adele: The rest of the flock are idiots.

Rev. Hope: I know what you mean.

Adele: I prefer to speak to God alone, in private.

Rev. Hope: Perhaps we could pray together.

Adele: Will God mind?

Rev. Hope: I’m sure he looks away when necessary.