Temples of Delight Page 5

Alice was eager for her parents to admire and love Jem just as she did – and yet they were inexplicably short on rapture. What was worse, Alice had overheard them discussing Jem behind her back.

  ‘And the state of the girl’s shoes!’ she heard her mother remark. ‘Don’t tell me that you failed to notice them, Harry? One can only wonder what sort of home the child comes from.’

  Alice heard the crackle as her father lowered his newspaper. Then she heard him utter a short, patronizing laugh.

  ‘And the chat that girl has in her!’ he said. ‘Talks the hind legs off a donkey.’ A donkey? Jem’s inspired and ever more captivating discourse? How dared they! Alice felt the first painful thrust of a wedge threatening to divide her from her parents.

  ‘But, Harry, such talk!’ Mrs Pilling said. ‘The impertinence! The personal remarks. “Rum in the chocolate mousse, Mrs Pilling? Or is it curaçao?” I’d like to give that girl curaçao!’

  ‘Cheer up, Valerie,’ said Alice’s father. ‘It won’t last. Our Alice won’t stand for all that faldeelah for long.’

  Mrs Pilling had omitted to mention here that she felt disquiet over the disappearance of a five-pound note from her handbag that Sunday afternoon. She had also omitted to mention the absence of a silver bracelet which Harry had bought her in Spain. Was it possible that she could have lost them? The money and the bracelet? And really, one did not want to provoke anything. Not now. Not with all the upset poor little Alice had had over Mr Fergusson’s dying.

  ‘What about Flora?’ Mr Pilling said. ‘She not come back to school yet?’

  Chapter 7

  Alice could hardly remember a time without Flora. They had been at nursery school together. Flora was then a small, dark-haired girl, smaller even than Alice, with prominent teeth and shabby clothes. She had spent all her time at the painting easel while other children hustled for tricycles or jammed plastic bricks into the playdough. She had endlessly painted houses. There had been something exceptional about Flora’s paintings, even then. The houses were not frontally presented, but contrived from a variety of angles with an unerring grasp of perspective. They were also quite remarkable for their meticulous attention to detail. If a line of washing hung between two trees in one of Flora’s paintings, then the laundry represented there – down to each perfect scollop of lace on each perfect pair of knickers – bore testimony to an infant mind of relentless and perhaps obsessional application. The sun which shone down upon Flora’s houses was never that facile, childish orb which wears a smile and trails its rays like spider’s legs. It was a faceless and intricate meshwork of glowing light-rays, complex and unwelcoming.

  Alice, who did not care for the rough and tumble of the nursery school, had none the less not immediately gravitated towards this other quiet, thoughtful child, perhaps because there was something austere about Flora; an emotional constraint which made her less than seductive. In fact Alice could not remember having spoken to Flora before the night, almost two years later, when the infant class had rehearsed their Christmas play.

  On that occasion, Flora had been cast in the star part. Flora, who had little clout in the infant group’s pecking order, was to play the Christmas Fairy. Alice, meanwhile, had been cast as a currant in the Christmas pudding. As an unassuming child with no expectations of stardom, Alice had weathered the casting disclosures with perfect equanimity, but her mother’s disappointment had been sufficient to provoke Mrs Pilling to intercede privately with the drama teacher. Miss Hemsworth had bowed to parental pressure only to the extent of offering to promote Alice one notch in the hierarchy of vine fruits and to recast her as a raisin.

  ‘But such a pretty little blonde girl,’ Mrs Pilling said. ‘Surely—?’

  ‘Unfortunately she stammers,’ Miss Hemsworth said firmly. ‘We couldn’t possibly give Alice a speaking part.’

  On the night of the dress rehearsal, Alice sat dutifully zipped into her flaccid sphere of brown satin. She looked every inch an outsize brown raisin with wrinkled, stockinette knees. Meanwhile, before her eyes, Flora was metamorphosing. Alice had not been aware before that night that Flora possessed an ability for metamorphosis, but the drama teacher had somehow perceived it through all Flora’s pallor and shabby clothes. She stood in a garment of white tulle and had just placed a glittering tiara on her sleek, dark head, when Alice, much affected by Flora’s sudden magic and wishing somehow to be drawn up into it, reached out to her with a question.

  ‘What are you g-getting-g-ging-ging. Getting for Christmas, F-lf-lf-?’ she said. ‘Flora?’

  Flora stroked her wand. ‘My big present is going to be a hot water bottle,’ she said confidently. ‘So that I won’t feel cold in bed.’

  Alice was both astonished and embarrassed. She did not dare, after that, to enquire what Flora thought her smaller presents might be, especially as she knew that her own parents were giving her a toy grocery shop for her ‘big present’ that year.

  Alice, as the only child of indulgent and comfortably-off parents, had always been liberally endowed with material goods. The Pillings had observed their little daughter falling in love with the grocery shop during an autumnal visit to Hamley’s, and they had ordered one for her at once. They always took her to Hamley’s after her visits to Dr Neumann, though Alice had never demanded it. She enjoyed herself so much at Dr Neumann’s that she never felt the need of presents afterwards. To go there was like a visit to a storybook grandfather. First Dr Neumann would conspire with her to send her parents off so that he and she could play really silly little games together all on their own. She always laughed so much with him because he had such a stack of funny little rhymes which he made her repeat and say out loud. And he always forgot them and muddled them up, so that she would have to correct him and say them properly. ‘Do forgive me Alice,’ he would say. ‘But I am such a forgetful and foolish old man.’ It was the greatest fun to help him out and remind him how they went.

  ‘I think your f-fairy dress,’ Alice said, ‘it’s all 1-1-1. It’s all f-floaty and nice.’

  Mrs Pilling came backstage just then to help with zips and tights. She noticed the little fairy girl in conversation with her daughter and promptly invited her to tea. Since Alice was an only child, Mrs Pilling was constantly alert to the need for compensating her with worldly goods and a well-contrived social life. She was an effective agent for her daughter, who in later years recognized it as no accident that her mother had become a successful estate agent. Agenting was a natural inclination with Mrs Pilling. She liked to see her clients well provisioned.

  Flora came just after Christmas – a time when Mrs Pilling was even better equipped than usual to place before her daughter’s guest a spread of great variety and delight. Afterwards she supervised the little girls as they made pink and white coconut ice at the cooker. Then they had taken it upstairs and eaten it, squatting on the floor of the toy grocery shop in Alice’s pink and white bedroom. The toy grocery shop was the size of a Wendy house and had a striped canvas awning over a real display window, while inside its shelves bulged seductively with toy provender. Out in front it had a free-standing barrow with brightly coloured imitation fruits that smelt like the real thing, if ‘scratched-and-sniffed’.

  Flora had been much impressed by the amenities that afternoon and Mrs Pilling had delighted in hosting her. Such a thin, pale, graceful child and so easily pleased! Mrs Pilling positively itched to purchase little frocks for Flora and to fix a brace to her protruding front teeth. She began at once referring to Flora as Alice’s ‘little friend’ and she soon instituted a regular visiting day.

  As time went by, the grocery shop made way for a teenage dolls’ house and the girls graduated to playing with two straw-blonde Sindy dolls which Alice’s mother kept adequately supplied with luxury consumer durables. The dolls owned everything from a miniature, functioning hair-dryer and a plastic Jacuzzi bath to a gypsy caravan and a riding stable full of plastic horses. Alice’s father had made the Sindy dolls a dream-home at his workbench in the ga
rage. The dream-home boasted a fitted, mahogany kitchen and a stone-clad feature-fireplace.

  Thus liberally equipped with props, Alice and Flora occasionally took to enacting for the Sindy dolls a fully operatic double wedding. The ceremony leaned heavily on one they had seen in an old fifties movie on the television one Saturday, and featured identical slipper-satin wedding gowns as pink and white as coconut ice. Gradually, as the props waned and the girls grew, the wedding became their own. Flora and Alice would curl up on Alice’s bed to envisage themselves as those lovely pink and white brides. Carrying ivory prayer books and lily of the valley, they would float down the aisle before a throng of ringletted bridesmaids dressed in clouds of flounced organdie. A barrel-chested Welsh baritone, like a cousin of Richard Burton’s, would sing ‘I’ll walk with God’ from the pulpit.

  Only the bridegrooms remained a little shadowy. While they had played weddings with Sindy dolls the girls had used a boy soldier doll in battle dress who had deputized for both, but it was hard to imagine bridegrooms for themselves. They were really not much interested in husbands. Far more so in their children. Alice decided to have lots and lots of children and all of them with lovely names like Amanda-Jane and Arabella and Dominic and Ganymede. Her children would wear velvet knickerbockers and Kate Greenaway frocks and would go to boarding school in a Swiss chalet along with Flora’s children where they would all be the best of friends.

  ‘But too many children will be expensive,’ Flora said. ‘I’m having two and mine aren’t called such silly names as yours. Mine are called Andrew and Janet.’

  ‘All right,’ Alice said, who was by nature accommodating. ‘Those are nice names, Flora.’ Sometimes the girls drew pictures of their children. Only then the sad thing was that Alice’s children never looked the way she knew they really looked. That was because she was no good at drawing. The poor little things stood, face forward like mugshots, their hands perpetually in their pockets and seeming as if they were afflicted with water on the brain. She felt as if she were letting them down. Flora’s two children looked so nice when she drew them, because Flora could draw so capably. They had properly jointed limbs and hands poised to pluck apples or to catch beach balls.

  ‘I w-w-wish you w-would-would draw them for me, Flora,’ Alice said, but Flora would not.

  ‘If I drew them, then they would be my children,’ she said. Alice accepted this, since it was asserted with such sureness. She was ill-equipped to appreciate that Flora had not much give and take. In all their games it was Alice who reached out, Flora who vetoed. Curious, when, from the outside, it was so apparent that Alice was the donor and Flora the recipient; the little matchgirl at the gate. There was always a kind of holding back with Flora. Unstated, unformulated, but subtly manifest in her behaviour, was the expectation that, while Alice was possessed of the golden spoon, she herself held the key to the future.

  Chapter 8

  Flora’s father was a miser. He was an educated and scholarly man of the drier and dustier sort, in command of a decent professional income, but it distressed him to part with money. In spite of this affliction – or paradoxically, because of it – the family lived in a large, neo-Georgian house which Alice’s mother, since the advent of her career as a house agent, had taken to calling ‘a heritage-style period property in a sought-after prime locality’.

  Mr Fergusson had married late in life and was already set in his ways. He was a silver-haired ascetic, handsome in a pale, cadaverous way, and already close to fifty. Flora’s mother was a shy young music student with a small, pointed face and a graceful, gliding carriage bearing witness to many years at the exercise bar in ballet classes. Upon her marriage, Mrs Fergusson, being other-worldy and much in awe of her husband, had immediately allowed herself to be plucked from the music school and absorbed into his abstemious, bookish, bachelor life in an illappointed tenement house off the Fulham Road.

  There, for the next three years, she shared a greasy old gas cooker on an upstairs landing with three cantankerous, aged residents from the floor below and carried washing-up water in a plastic bucket from the bathroom two floors down. Having done this right through her pregnancy, the young Mrs Fergusson’s carriage had gradually become less graceful and the doctor had been obliged to prescribe elastic support bandages and finally surgery for severe varicose veins.

  Since there was no refrigerator in the apartment – Mr Fergusson having declared such an appliance an unnecessary luxury in a temperate climate – Mrs Fergusson had been required to shop daily for their admittedly frugal requirements. When the baby came, she dragged both the shopping and the pram up the three flights of stairs each morning – a feat made necessary by her elderly neighbours who refused her permission to leave the baby’s carriage in the hall. She ran this gauntlet under the vigilance of their stony eyes each morning, and observed them with a faint heart as they scrutinized the stairway for any resulting scuff marks. Mr Fergusson, naturally, remained aloof from such trivial domestic difficulties, which was perhaps just as well, since he would very likely have declared in favour of the elderlies.

  The demands of her domestic duties left Mrs Fergusson little time for her music, though she had been considered one of the more promising students at the music school. Her Scarlatti scores languished, leprous with neglect, in a damp gas cupboard from which they emerged only with the move to the prime locality four years later. There had been ‘no money’ for a piano and no room for one either, since all available space in the apartment had been taken up either by the sleeping area, which was cordoned off by a sagging cretonne drape, or by the dining area which was occupied by a paint-stained plywood table and matching chromelegged chairs. A curious, bench-like settle, covered in scarred green Rexine, ran the length of one wall and looked as if it had been discarded from one of British Rail’s more modestly appointed waiting rooms. So the house was devoid of music. It went without saying that the elderlies, who regularly banged on the ceiling with broom handles at the sound of a footfall on the floorboards, would have considered Scarlatti sufficient grounds to petition for the Fergussons’ eviction.

  The arrival of the baby had made things additionally difficult for Mrs Fergusson, who had never been welcomed in a house full of hard-eyed geriatrics. Her husband, with his sober habits and prematurely ossified mind, had always been regarded as ‘a proper gentleman’ – an honorary old age pensioner almost – but Mrs Fergusson’s youth, for all that she was timorous and biddable, jarred against the house tradition and her baby was considered an outrage.

  Flora’s mother had at first studied assiduously to ingratiate herself with the tenants through excessive acts of servitude. She had polished the cracked linoleum on the landings, shined up the brass door handles and scraped decades of carbonized filth from the cooker until a submerged pattern of blue and white mottling had appeared from the oven walls to reward her. The tenants, however, had either considered her efforts an impertinent assault upon the house lifestyle, or they had allowed her labours to pass unnoticed and unacknowledged. Invariably, within the week they had left porridge pots to boil over on the newly scrubbed hobs and had greased up the splash-back with layers of congealed mutton fat.

  From then on Mrs Fergusson had striven instead to become acceptable through invisibility. She had assumed, for the rest of her days, a kind of greyish camouflage which worked its way deep into her being. Exiled from the music school and denied the train fare to visit her parents, she had become effectively orphaned in the clutches of her husband – a predicament she resolved by assimilating Mr Fergusson’s attitudes with all the immoderate zeal of a sycophant.

  Thus it was that the woman Alice knew throughout Flora’s childhood was mean-minded, dyspeptic and grudging. She held her mouth permanently drawn into a tight, disgruntled little knot like an anal sphincter. For Alice she possessed an aura of shredded suet and Milk of Magnesia. Alice had watched her sometimes as she stood at her kitchen table, rolling gluey balls of mashed potato for the evening meal on a grey, floured b
oard, or contriving dumplings like outside lumps in school tapioca pudding. Alice, whose own household leaned towards hedonism in matters of food, was thoroughly puzzled by the sight of Flora’s mother conserving used tea bags in old jam jars and grumbling about her lodgers’ profligate use of hot water. Mrs Fergusson grumbled about everything, it seemed to Alice – except her husband. She grumbled that Flora went through light bulbs too quickly and grew out of her netball socks. She grumbled about tuppenny price rises on washing soda and gravy browning.

  The Fergussons’ move from the tenement house had come about when Flora was three. At that time Mr Fergusson had been thrown into a quandary by the offer of a job as curator of a metropolitan museum housing major manuscript collections. Since the act of parting with money had always pained him even more than the acquisition of it had given him satisfaction (and since he was well aware that a significant rise in his salary would result in an increased tax liability), the prospect of a larger yield to the Inland Revenue caused him many a sleepless night.

  In due course, Flora’s father resolved his dilemma by accepting the job and at the same time preparing to invest the entirety of his fiscal hoardings, plus a large proportion of his new income, in the purchase of a house so far above his means that his tax relief on the purchase would be considerable and the monthly outlay such as to justify a continued regime of the most rigorous domestic economy. His plan was by no means to have his family enjoy the comfort of less confined quarters, but to fill the house with lodgers, whose rent would be paid in cash and would consequently go undeclared into his coffers.

  Without consulting his wife, Mr Fergusson resolved not only upon the purchase of the heritage-style period property, but also upon inducing his own widowed mother to sell up her small semidetached house in Bournemouth, so that she might add her takings to the project in return for taking up residence within her son’s household. This scheme had several benefits, as he perceived them. It meant that his mother’s property was sold before death duties could rise to haunt him, and it made available a resident, unpaid childminder who would liberate his wife for some suitably lowly form of employment. This last would allow Mr Fergusson to conserve even more of his own money without giving his wife too great a taste for the emancipating power of earned income. Furthermore, his mother would bring along with her sufficient furnishings and effects to render the purchase of additional household items unnecessary.