Lizzie Vogel 1 - Man at the Helm

27

Soon our father called to take us for the day. It seemed that Bernard had been let go and he was doing his own driving in an automatic Citroën with an interesting suspension action. He didn’t come into the house but tooted outside in the street and sat at the wheel, looking uncertain. We drove the forty minutes or so to his side of the county without saying much, the rattle of his onyx ring on the vibrating gearstick mesmerizing and annoying at the same time, and I think it was that that made my sister pull the side of my hair. There was no other reason for it.

We started having a tussle in the back seat and pulling each other’s hair. It was unusual for us to be fighting like that and I was offended at her starting it. It seemed too intimate a thing for our father to witness; nevertheless, I fought hard and actually made her cry, which was horrible. The startling thing was that our father completely ignored us. He didn’t look at us or say anything, only turned to Little Jack next to him and reminded him to notice the car’s suspension.

‘You’ll feel the car lowering when we come to a stop.’ Or something.

When our fight had completely finished he asked us how we were enjoying our new house.

‘It’s very small but fine,’ said my sister.

And when we arrived at his house we found he had moved too. He was surprised we didn’t know but concluded he’d forgotten to tell us or our mother had. His new house was a good deal less grand than his last, though not quite so small as ours and still managed to have all the features you’d expect from a superior dwelling, plus his housekeeper was still going round with a cloth and pegging things out on the line.

‘I hear the firm has gone bankrupt,’ said my sister. I marvelled at her use of language. The Firm.

‘Well, yes, there have been some problems,’ said our father.

We had the dreaded Sunday lunch, albeit at the kitchen table, and the baby who was a bit older by now wasn’t all that well behaved and therefore didn’t make Jack seem inferior, and the newer baby was of less interest to everybody, being the second and a girl and brown-haired.

My sister brought up the subject of our mother’s job and said how much she was enjoying driving a Leyland van all day long and running into pub toilets five days a week, and after sounding quite interesting it went on too long and seemed pointed. I was cross with my sister. First, the unprovoked hair-pulling in the automatic Citroën, then the below-the-belt account of our mother’s work. I wondered what was the matter with her. But then, as if in answer to that, I blurted out something truly awful. I didn’t plan to and as I began it seemed like plain old chitchat, but as soon as it was out I realized it was nothing less than heartbreaking.

‘People keep saying you’re evil and bad,’ I said to my father, between mouthfuls of the roast dinner.

My father didn’t wince, he just said, ‘I am sorry you’re having to hear that kind of thing. It’s very unfortunate. I really am very sorry.’ And his wife let her knife and fork clatter onto the table and looked at the wall.

‘It doesn’t bother me,’ I said, thinking that made it better.

I didn’t steal anything from the house on that trip. I usually took a pot of jam or a tin of mandarins. There was less on offer and I didn’t feel it fair or right now the firm had gone bankrupt. But I did smoke in the bedroom and finish a bottle of lemonade that was meant to be for all of us.

Back at home my sister exaggerated how small and ordinary our father’s new house was, to make our mother feel better, but then accidentally mentioned Mrs Penrose and our mother pounced on it.

‘They can still run to a maid-of-all-work, then?’ she said.

‘Yes, but to be fair he hasn’t got a chauffeur any more,’ my sister said, and then realized how silly it sounded and we all laughed.

Our mother settled down at the laundry after the verbal warning and got back into the swing of being a Snowdrop driver, Mr Holt remaining a fly in the ointment, though. If he hadn’t been there our mother would have found the getting up and going every morning so much easier. He was a stickler and seemed to notice every detail and to be actually on the lookout for mistakes and problems. If she was a few minutes late, he’d tap his wrist at her. If she unloaded in the wrong bay, he’d make her load up again and move the van. If she and Deano were back early, he’d give them an errand. One day a customer had rung to say a roller towel had jammed only moments after our mother had installed the clean one and left. Mr Holt made her go out to the customer and unjam it.

Once she’d found a dozen clean folded tea towels in the van and realized they’d left a customer without his correct number. They’d been halfway home when the discovery was made and decided to leave it until the next day. Back at the depot, Mr Holt noticed the tiny pile of hidden towels with his eagle eye and sent her back into town. When she put up a reasonable argument for dropping them in the following day, he simply waved her on and said, ‘Wedge. Thin end of.’

It really seemed as though Mr Holt picked on her especially, that was the galling thing. One morning he stood in front of the van as she pulled out of the depot. He waved her down and told her to get out. Then he sent her home to change into sensible footwear. He insisted on all van drivers and boys taking a lunch break at a certain place on whichever route they were on and would check to see if they had indeed had a stop. Our mother said this showed he was a fascist.

The absolute worst of it was that none of her colleagues at the Snowdrop would complain about Mr Holt. No one seemed to want to say how picky and petty he was, and as far as she could tell, the rest of the workforce seemed to think his management style perfectly reasonable. They weren’t friends with him or anything, except after work hours when he might chuckle at a joke or make an ironic observation; he was a popular, albeit distant, boss.

She told us that if she’d been able to get it off her chest, moan about him or slag him off, it might have made things easier, but she couldn’t and apologized for ‘bringing it home with her’. I didn’t mind, neither did Little Jack, who suggested putting a picture of him on the dartboard, but that seemed too drastic. Our sister did mind. She told our mother she was part of the workforce now and the workforce needed leadership. And it was natural for someone from her background finding themselves suddenly in a subordinate role to resist and that she needed breaking in like a young horse. And that was probably what Mr Holt was doing, hence it seeming as if he was picking on her.

One day Deano the van boy called in sick and Mr Holt took his place on our mother’s van. It was the worst day of her life, worse than all the court appearances, drugged-up hellish days in bed, school days, you name it. Mr Holt had sat in the passenger seat all stony silence, glancing at the dash as our mother drove the route and used the handbrake whenever possible. When our mother got home she needed two Disprins and a hot whisky to shift a day-long headache. The day had seemed like a week, she said, and we told her that was exactly how we felt after going to our father’s and that it wasn’t Mr Holt’s fault (nor our father’s), just the tension of the situation. Of not being able to relax.

We wanted details of the day. Mr Holt had insisted on a proper stop for lunch and the two had had to sit and eat a cheese and chutney cob together and he had chewed very slowly. He’d made her refuel before returning to the depot. He’d made her drop new price sheets off at every stop and, worse than anything, he chatted to the customers who knew him and he asked how things had been, customer service-wise.

‘Didn’t you chat amongst yourselves?’ my sister asked.

‘A bit,’ she said. ‘I told him why I’d taken the job at Snowdrop.’

‘I hope you didn’t say for the money,’ said my sister.

‘I said I’d taken it because we’d been derailed,’ she said.

‘Derailed?’ we said.

‘Catastrophically knocked off course, but that now I was taking control.’

‘Taking the helm,’ I said.

‘Well, I didn’t say that, but yes,’ she said, and went to phone Deano.

My sister knew about my friendship with Melody by then and was quite understanding about it. The two of them had a mutual though lopsided respect for each other. My sister liked Melody but was slightly contemptuous of her attempts at prettiness and ladylike ways. Melody’s admiration of my sister, however, was unconditional. I expect it was because mine was (unconditional) and things like that rub off. I wasn’t constantly advertising my sister’s virtues or anything, but had said the odd thing that would have struck a chord with Melody. Such as her trying to save a duckling’s life and her having the guts to snitch on a dinner lady who called a girl with a lazy eye ‘Nelson’.

Our friendship came under some strain around the time of our move to the Sycamore Estate, though. It was nothing to do with our not being neighbours any longer, but my early grapplings with the semantics of fashion accessories coincided with Melody’s handbag-usage phase (and her wearing of a beady necklace which she claimed played down a veiny sternum). Somehow the handbags and beads signalled she wasn’t going to shape up as a friend. The final straw (metaphorically speaking) was a fabric bucket with bamboo hoops for handles, which Melody suddenly had with her at all times. What made me most sick about it was her habit (out of necessity) of frequently saying to me, ‘Can you just hold my bag a moment?’

This was because she couldn’t perform any two-handed task while holding it, due to the hoops being too small in circumference to be slipped up on to the shoulder. So, time after time, I’d be left holding it while she fiddled with her shoelace or gate latch. It wasn’t as if the bag ever had anything worth carrying in it either, such as a Wagon Wheel or a penknife. I could tell this by the weight – it was, for all its stupid bucket-size, light as a feather. It was, like so many women’s things, like a clumsy prop for a fancy-dress costume.

It sounds harsh, I know, but I had just realized that opting for anything sensible in the way of bags, shoes, trousers (even books and hobbies) marked you out as a tomboy (even if you weren’t a tomboy as such), and although being a tomboy was thought by adults to be marvellous, it was a problem when it came to other children. Other tomboys might admire you but would often want to compete in tomboyishness, and that meant possibly having to fight them or having to jump off a roof or watch them dissect a wasp without minding.

Non-tomboys would not admire you – they’d think you were heading in the wrong direction and were either a lesbian in the making, which seemed a bad choice, or too lazy to make the effort for womanhood. I suppose they had to think these things in order to justify their own inconveniences and encumbrances. But back then it all felt like a trap.

Anyway, Melody had the womanly bag – and was looked up to by other budding women in spite of her childish clothes and veiny sternum – and she seemed happy. One day, it came to a head. Melody said, ‘Could you hold my bag for a sec? My necklace has slipped round the wrong way.’

And I said, ‘No, I bloody couldn’t … Why the hell do you carry it around with you anyway?’

‘It’s my knitting,’ said Melody, sounding shocked and hurt.

I said I doubted there was any knitting in the bag and that she just wanted to look like a budding woman. Melody adjusted the beads with the bag between her knees and shuffled quickly away and I was furious with myself, as you are when you do things like that. It felt like an ending.

Grocery shopping was a trial. Our mother was OK sending us to do it a bit at a time and the system where we nipped across the road to Miss Woods’s when we needed something had suited her down to the ground. But self-serving a trolley-load of groceries and toilet paper in a brightly lit space had got the better of her enough times that we knew to avoid doing too much in one go. However, now she was a full-time worker it seemed sensible to stock up in one big weekly shop.

Our mother had settled well at Snowdrop and I was over my episode with the pig and my sister was over the Brownie letter and Little Jack even seemed to be speaking more easily and our mother was well into the reflection of the mountain in the lake. My sister and I had been discussing the Man List and wondering if it was time to recommence with the quest to find a man for our helm. So, one Saturday afternoon, sailing up the A50 in the unreliable Hillman Husky, our mother said, ‘Shall we call in at Woolco and do a big shop?’

With all these very positive things in mind, we thought it would probably be fine. And we said yes. Because while a failed big shop was always depressing and upsetting, a successful one was to be celebrated for all the obvious reasons – mainly that we could have fried eggs on toast and Debbie could enjoy Pal for active life or Pedigree Chum or whatever was on offer and we’d have a whole week with no worrying about margarine or Weetabix.

Anyway, we went and loaded a trolley with essentials and the odd treat. Things seemed to be going well and it looked as though we’d get through it when suddenly our mother said, ‘No, I’m unequal to this, it’s too much – come on, I have to leave.’

And, as usual, my sister protested. ‘We need this stuff, Mum,’ she said.

‘I can’t do it,’ said our mother, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’

‘But, Mum,’ said my sister, ‘we’re almost at the tills.’

The two of them argued briefly, but in the end we left the trolley by the soap powders and came home via the Red Rickshaw with ‘no beef savoury feast for 2’, which is what we always did on these occasions. On the way home my sister made a very clever observation.

‘We always go to the Chinese takeaway if we leave the shopping,’ she said.

‘That’s because it’s always nearly supper time and we’ve no food,’ said Jack.

‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said my sister, ‘it’s always that time in the afternoon.’

‘So what?’ I said.

‘It’s a classic low time for middle-aged women and people with mental illness,’ said my sister.

You might think our mother would’ve been pleased to hear that and feel a bit better about it all, but she wasn’t and told my sister to stop talking such a lot of utter crap. And then, just as she said that, pulling into our little driveway we saw the most amazing and beautiful sight – a cluster of carrier bags huddled by our front door. A family pack of Andrex, a tray of Pal for active life, and a family-size box of Daz automatic. It was our shopping, the exact shopping we’d just abandoned at Woolco.

Our mother was astonished and stood and stared down at it. She looked up the street and then down the street. I thought for a moment she was going to be angry. But she was simply amazed.

‘What do you think it means, Lizzie?’ she asked.

‘I think it means someone saw us dump the trolley,’ said Jack.

‘Yes,’ agreed our mother.

‘And they took the trolley to the tills and paid for everything and brought it here,’ I said.

‘That means they know where we live,’ said my sister.

‘But they can’t have followed us. We stopped at the takeaway,’ said our mother.

‘They know us,’ I said.

‘It’s like The Railway Children,’ said my sister.

‘Oh my God, it is,’ said our mother.

And we all got teary at the thought.

As soon as we’d finished our Chinese we unloaded our lovely shopping. It had been so long since we’d had the luxury of unpacking so much, Little Jack couldn’t stop listing everything, ‘Cornflakes, Sunblest, Mr Fresh, medicated Vosene, Knight’s Castile, Jacob’s, Germolene.’

And no stammering.

‘Robinson’s, Bird’s, Fairy Bentos,’ he sang.

‘Fairy Bentos,’ said my sister, ‘what’s that?’ and she took the thing from Jack’s hand.

It was a round tin containing a steak and gravy pie with flaky pastry. It wasn’t ours; we hadn’t put it in our shopping trolley. We decided it had been added by our benefactor as a special treat, and if we hadn’t just had the ‘no beef savoury feast for 2’ from the Red Rickshaw we might have cooked it up.

We tried to imagine who it might have been. Our father? Grandmother? The vicar? Charlie? Mr Lomax? Mr Oliphant? Mr Longlady?

The next day I was shocked to see Melody Longlady at the door. Bagless. We were no longer anything like neighbours (and after the disagreement about the bag, not even friends) and her being there at the door meant she’d come all the way to the bottom part of the village and then ventured into the Sycamore Estate and looked around for our house. Plus she was wearing a maroon tracksuit and no beads.

‘Hi, Melody,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ said Melody.

‘Have you been on a run?’ I asked.

‘No, why?’ she said.

It was a bit odd and formal like that for a while until I invited her in and we went into our part of the sitting room. We hadn’t sorted out a settee yet, but there was a bouncy little Zedbed that we all sat on to watch telly. I flopped down and Melody flopped down beside me. I couldn’t turn the telly on because it had gone yellow.

‘How’s the new house?’ she asked.

‘It’s great,’ I said.

Melody looked as though she had some really bad news to tell me. Someone had died or she’d seen her father in the nude. But it was only the surprise of seeing how everything was, the general situation, the state of the house, hearing about the pets. I hadn’t wanted to tell her about the pets but had no choice when she’d gone round the back to see the guinea pigs and found only a few earwigs in the hutch. I asked her if she was OK.

‘It’s just seeing you here, and the pets all gone,’ she began, and listed the negatives. Of course I could quite see what she meant and it must have been a bit of a shock, but I reassured her that the pets had been re-homed and were happier than ever with lots of bored elderly people giving them titbits or on farms chasing rats. And that we were really happy too, living down there.

‘It’s so near the chemist,’ I said.

I remembered our kitchen full of food from the recent shopping miracle and offered Melody a glass of Nesquik and an orange Club, to cheer her up, which she accepted.

‘Will you ever regain your former status?’ she asked.

‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘Our mum wasn’t trained for anything except living the way we did and so she’s driving a laundry van.’

‘I know, we’ve seen her in the van,’ said Melody. ‘She must absolutely hate it.’

‘She doesn’t hate it, but it is work and that’s never that nice,’ I said.

‘Is she in the van now?’ Melody asked.

‘No’ – I pointed to the chipboard partition – ‘she’s the other side of that, asleep.’

Melody frowned and then she said something, the likes of which I had never heard and it had such a profound effect on me, it was all I could do not to cry into a cushion.

‘My dad,’ she whispered, ‘thinks your mum is the most amazing woman he’s ever met, selling up and getting that awful van-driving job.’

I did the thing that people do when they want to hear a good thing twice.

‘What did he say?’ I asked, and settled back on the Zedbed to hear it all again and, knowing Melody, expected it verbatim, but she surprised me with an elaboration that was even better.

‘He said he didn’t know many women who’d grab the bull by the horns and go out to work all hours,’ she whispered, ‘and not hang around waiting for handouts.’

I felt a bit humbled. There I was forever moaning about the village and all its inhabitants and their handbags, and here was Melody in her tracksuit. She’d come to visit and been affected by our riches-to-rags slippage and even passed on a wonderful compliment and done nothing but good. It was like our friendship coming true and I was and still am immensely grateful.

When she left, I said, ‘It was really nice of you to come all this way.’

And she said, ‘I came yesterday as well but you were out.’

And, thinking about that for a moment, I made the assumption that it must have been Mr Longlady who’d bought our shopping for us and felt a bit disappointed.

‘Oh, was it you who brought our shopping round?’ I asked.

‘No, but I saw the man dropping it off,’ said Melody.

‘Did you? What did he look like,’ I asked, holding her elbows, ‘the man?’

‘He had brown hair and glasses,’ she said, as if that was enough.

‘Did he come in a car?’ I asked.

‘Yes, a yellow one.’

‘Mustard-coloured?’ I asked, high-pitched.

‘Yes, mustard-coloured,’ said Melody.

I knew then. It had been Mr Holt.

Then Melody fiddled around in her pocket and handed me a bundled-up woollen thing which turned out to be a knitted green hat with a lumpy yellow sun.

‘I knitted it for you,’ she said.

I put it straight on my head so I didn’t have the embarrassment of looking at it.

‘Wow, thanks,’ I said.

‘That’s OK,’ she said.

‘Did you knit it before or after our fall-out?’ I asked.

‘Before and after,’ she said.

Then she said she had to go and left. I called from the front door, ‘Thanks for the hat and thanks for coming, Melody.’

And she called, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m trying to shorten my name, to Mel.’

‘OK, Mel,’ I said, and it suited her.

When my sister got home I told her everything. Starting with the shopping and it being Mr Holt.

‘Mr Holt!’ she said, and her eyes looked from side to side and she rolled her gum frantically between her front teeth as she thought about the implications.

‘We mustn’t tell Mum,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘He did it secretly and I think he knows best,’ she said.

‘Better than us?’ I asked.

‘Lizzie,’ she said, with a face of great importance, ‘I think he might be it.’

‘It? God!’ I said, not knowing what to think.

I told the rest of the news about Melody. How nice she had been and about the wonderful compliment from Mr Longlady, and knitting me the hat, coming all this way, being sad about the pets and worrying about the whole move thing.

‘A truer friend no one had,’ said my sister, which, put like that, sounded poetic but might have been a bit sarcastic.

We talked in bed that night for a long time. We agreed not to say anything to our mother about Mr Holt and that we’d just let nature take its course. We talked and talked but fell asleep before we’d finished.

Early one morning when I was still in bed, I heard our mother cry out in surprise. I thought perhaps she’d made another hole in another door or a handle had come off. Then I heard her on the phone.

‘I’m going to be late,’ she said into the phone, ‘I might not make it in today at all.’

And then she talked some more but incoherently and tearful and I knew something terrible must have happened. And it had.

I was frightened of what I might find but eventually went to see. It was still dark outside and, because the bulb had blown in the hall, she was down there, with a bicycle lamp flickering, cross-legged on the floor with her head resting on Debbie. I thought she’d had a nervous breakdown and was just wondering if I should call the police or make some coffee when the door knocked softly and, being broken, it opened on its own and Mr Holt was suddenly there, framed, in his big coat with the early dawning light behind him and the birds singing in the young hedges like something out of Snow White.

Our mother shuffled aside to let him in and then gave a gasp as she saw me on the stairs. And she told me, right in front of him, that Debbie had died. I didn’t want to believe it and genuinely thought I might be dreaming. It seemed very likely, bearing in mind that Mr Holt was there in a ginormous coat and my sister and I having decided that he was our future man at the helm, plus all the tweeting birds and the dreadful news about Debbie. It was too much and too strange to be real. So I just sat down on the stairs and hugged my knees to see what would happen.

‘What do you plan to do?’ Mr Holt asked.

‘You don’t plan at a time like this,’ said our mother.

Mr Holt stood there and our mother looked up at him and said, ‘I’m not sure you understand just how sad this news is.’

Mr Holt glanced up at me. ‘I understand,’ he said.

He said he’d go and open up the depot and come back as soon as he could. ‘I want to help you with this,’ he said.

When he had gone, she looked at me and said, ‘What did he just say?’ and I just nodded, meaning he had said the thing she thought he’d said.

Then there were a few awful minutes when the others came downstairs and had to hear the news. Debbie had died on her cushion in her corner and had looked very peaceful, our mother said. None of us had heard any barks, so we concluded she’d ceased upon the midnight with no pain and of natural causes. We were too sad to act sad. So we had a slice of Battenberg and a cup of tea and then Mr Holt was back and we couldn’t wallow with him there, as we had to be on our best behaviour.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ my sister asked.

‘No thank you, love,’ said Mr Holt.

Mr Holt asked what we wanted to do with Debbie. We all said we wanted to bury her in the garden and mark the grave with a stone memorial, but Mr Holt said that wouldn’t be possible, the garden being too small. His suggestion was to have her cremated at the vet’s and get on with life.

We agreed – none of us really wanted her out there next to that old rabbit called Bunny. Mr Holt lifted Debbie, wrapped in a blanket, into his car boot and we all set off to the vet’s. When we got there Mr Holt placed her on a table and that was it. And Mr Holt drove us home again and went.

A few days after that Mr Holt came round with a piece of stone. It was the size of two house bricks and beige. It was Debbie’s gravestone, not that she had a grave as such.

‘What words do you want on this?’ he asked.

Jack, who was usually good with words, came up with Debdog, which wasn’t up to his usual standard and sounded idiotic.

‘Debbie, the greatest dog in the world?’ I tried.

‘Too long,’ said my sister.

‘Debbie the dog?’ said Jack.

‘Too childish,’ I said.

‘How about Princess Debbie Reynolds?’ said our mother. ‘That’s her kennel name.’

And however real and official it was, it sounded so utterly wrong for Debbie that none of us could respond until Mr Holt said, ‘PDR would be cheaper, and means the same thing.’

‘Yes,’ we all said, ‘PDR.’

‘Perfect Dog Rests,’ said Jack, but we all ignored him, it being a bit strange.

And when, a few days later, we saw the brick again, it had PDR carved into it in capitals. The chiselled letters were multifaceted and shadow-filled, so that they seemed not to be indented but standing out. It was an optical illusion, maybe a deliberate feature of the carving method. Whatever, it looked very beautiful and sombre and therefore perfect to commemorate our wonderful Debbie.

We held a stone-placing ceremony and put it in the garden as you do with memorials, and it looked rubbish (like someone had just dropped a large brick on the ground while passing through), but no one said anything aloud. We all said secret things to Debbie in our minds. I thanked her for her support and apologized for the time I put her in the wheelbarrow.

Mr Holt didn’t want to join in with us. It was our business and he didn’t want to see all the blubbering and nonsense, plus he said he’d spent enough time faffing.

The awfulness of Debbie’s death cannot be described. Nothing helped.