Temples of Delight Page 6

  So it was that the young Mrs Fergusson moved into her elegant, five-bedroomed house, with her husband, her child, her mother-in-law and a handful of cold, gloomy lodgers who wore their overcoats indoors from October right through March. She existed cheek by jowl with neighbours who owned two cars apiece and manicured velvet lawns over summer weekends, after invigorating bouts of tennis. Against the tinkle of their Scotch tumbling over ice cubes, and the aroma of their charcoal-grilled al fresco lunches, Mrs Fergusson let down the hems of such threadbare curtains as she could claw from her mother-in-law’s collection and reassembled the cretonne drapes to hang, patched and joined, at the drawing-room windows. Even after assiduous pressing, the fade lines of old hems showed up stubbornly against the panes and all the curtains refused to reach the sills, leaving unsightly inch-deep gaps. Thus it was that the house, over the years, took on the look of a shelter for battered wives and became a focus for agitation among the more zealous members of the residents’ association.

  The Fergusson family never experienced the joys of its gasfired central heating system, since both Mr Fergusson and his mother believed the achievement of warmth to be morally justifiable only after the hauling of coal sacks. Flora’s father sanctioned the activation of the hot water system for an hour once a week, on Sunday evenings, for purposes of bathing, while for washing dishes Mrs Fergusson stood over the cooker in her well-appointed new kitchen, heating water in a tin whistling kettle of the sort made for boy scouts to hang over camp fires.

  Predictably, Mrs Fergusson the elder did not materialize as an unqualified asset, though she had indeed added to the furnishings. She had brought with her four grubby old half-moon rugs which were placed at the hearth stones of the Fergussons’ Adam-style fireplaces, and she had contributed an assemblage of clumsy, war-time ‘suites’ in walnut veneer. These equipped two of the bedrooms and helped to supplement the green Rexine settle in the drawing-room, while at the same time bestowing an air of forties Oxo-commercial cosiness which married ill with the architectural pretensions of the Fergussons’ elm-floored investment property.

  The old woman ensured that the aura of geriatric vigilance which had permeated the tenement house followed Flora’s mother to the suburbs. Mrs Fergusson the elder, always eager to see slights to her person and her possessions, was wont ceaselessly to remind her daughter-in-law and her grandchild whence the household valuables had come. She was much inclined – as Alice discovered to her terror – to pounce out from corners with triumphant accusations of rough handling. Flora had apparently become serenely accustomed to her grandmother’s mean-minded rebukes which accompanied her daily efforts to rake out ash from the grates.

  ‘I’ll thank you not to tread muck into that hearthrug, Flora!’ the old woman would shriek vengefully. ‘You’ll kindly remember where it came from!’ But Alice as a small child was once reduced to tears by the old woman’s wrath. She had provoked it by touching one of the pot-bellied Hummel figurines which stood about cluttering the mantel-shelves.

  Flora’s grandmother had already been partially incontinent when she moved in and she had come accompanied by an ill-tempered lap-dog with a similar affliction and with patches of untreated mange. Furthermore, she came with an old gramophone and a pile of Bing Crosby records which she played alternately with the Coldstream Guards doing a miscellany of Allied war tunes.

  * * *

  Mrs Fergusson duly gained employment as a part-time piano teacher in the junior department of what became Alice’s and Flora’s school. Since she was without formal qualifications, her salary was satisfactorily low, while her position came with the fringe benefit of a free place for Flora until the child became eligible to compete for the twelve-to-sixteen scholarship.

  When Mrs Fergusson was not engaged upon her teaching duties, she continued as before to buy half-price broken biscuits from Woolworths and to glean free, dropped vegetables from the leavings of the weekly market stalls. She made oatmeal porridge for breakfast each morning, and for lunch over weekends and school holidays she contrived a greenish, oil-globule soup out of bacon rinds and cabbage water. This potage, liberally seasoned with the kind of pulverized white pepper which Alice’s mother reserved for throwing into burglars’ eyes, had always disconcerted Alice almost as much as the heavy, moral virtue which Flora’s parents made of one’s ability to swallow gristle. Flora had become a great favourite with all the school dinner ladies, because her youthful training had ensured that she could bolt lumps of gristle the size of walnuts without gagging. Alice found it a disturbing accomplishment in her friend. She did not like to look at Flora across the table during school dinner, because swallowing gristle always made Flora lose her calm, dignified look and momentarily take on the aspect of a farm-yard turkey.

  There were things that Alice couldn’t begin to understand about her friend. How could a person like Flora gulp green oil-globule soup? How was it that the Flora, who could draw like an angel and play the Well-Tempered Klavier in the assembly hall, could be the same Flora who nonchalantly forked up rubbery obscenities of beef cartilage and gulped them in a film of school gravy? What, in short, made Flora tick? At twelve she had duly qualified for the twelve-to-sixteen scholarship. Yet, though her art work and her music were excellent, Flora had never seemed to be especially bright. However did she do it?

  It made Alice uneasy sometimes, imagining what became of Flora when she wasn’t there to look at her. Did she exist on an endless treadmill of theorems and conjugations? And why? Did her parents tie her to her desk each night? Or were her scholarly performances yet another feature of her ruthless singleness of purpose?

  Chapter 9

  After Mr Fergusson’s death, both Flora and her mother absented themselves from school premises for very nearly a month. While this was quite long enough to provoke the odd murmur in the school staff room, Alice herself never ventured to question the family’s claim to extended grief. Especially since the Fergussons’ loss had come about as a direct result of interference on the part of Mrs Pilling.

  Alice had been helping her mother fill two trolleys with groceries in the local supermarket one Friday afternoon when they noticed Mrs Fergusson at the other end of the aisle. Mrs Fergusson had stopped rummaging in a basket of cut-price tins, and was looking up with an expression of modified elation.

  ‘Brian,’ she said to her husband who stood about two yards in front of her. ‘Brian, what about this for tomorrow night?’ Alice saw that she was grasping a ham-shaped tin of cured pork shoulder. It was an item, dense with sodium phosphate and gelatine, such as her own mother disdained to purchase except for inclusion in her annual charity hampers for the Old Folks Home at Christmas.

  ‘Dear oh dear,’ said Mrs Pilling in low tones to her daughter. ‘Would you look at the poor woman, Alice? Is there anything lifts her spirits like a bargain?’ She shook her head with pitying condescension. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Really I don’t. Four-pence off ox-tripe. Tuppence off shredded suet. Poor old Flora.’

  ‘Mum?’ Alice said. ‘What do people do with shredded suet?’

  ‘Oh well,’ said her mother. ‘They make puddings. But it’s very out of fashion. That’s unless you want to give your husband a heart attack.’

  ‘Won’t Mr Fergusson have a heart attack?’ Alice said. Her mother gave her an affectionate squeeze and a small, wry smile.

  ‘I doubt it, lovey,’ she said. ‘Mr Fergusson’ll go on for ever – just for the pleasure of making that poor woman miserable.’ She tossed a stack of Indonesian condiments into her basket and winked. ‘That was naughty of me, Alice,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  When the Fergussons came level, Mrs Fergusson was still grasping the ham-shaped tin. She looked rather guilty, Alice thought, as if caught out in the pursuit of prohibited luxuries. She glanced at the tin and then addressed Mrs Pilling woman-to-woman.

  ‘Our wedding anniversary tomorrow …’ she said, ‘something a little bit special …’ Her smile showed prematurely receding gums.

>   Mrs Pilling could bear it no longer. ‘Your wedding anniversary?’ she said. ‘Tomorrow? Millie, you will put back that ridiculous tin this instant because Harry and I are taking you out to dinner!’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Mrs Fergusson weakly. ‘Oh no. Thank you, Valerie, but we couldn’t.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Mrs Pilling. ‘This will be my treat and I won’t take no for an answer. We’ll have a nice table for six at The Fisherman’s Grotto and the girls shall come along too. What do you say, Alice? You and Flora?’

  ‘Oh yes please,’ Alice said, thinking how generous her mother always was and how pretty her teeth were when she smiled. ‘Oh yes, if Flora’s coming.’

  ‘Of course she’s coming,’ Mrs Pilling said. ‘Flora is practically one of the family.’

  Mrs Fergusson was casting about awkwardly. ‘Oh, but we couldn’t,’ she said. ‘No, no. Really we couldn’t. Brian would get indigestion, just thinking about the expense—’

  ‘The expense will be all mine, Millie,’ Mrs Pilling said, with just a touch of put-down. ‘And I can assure you that I’ll not get indigestion over it.’

  Mr Fergusson was suddenly at her side and smiling his handsome, pallid smile at Alice’s mother. ‘What nonsense you talk, Millie,’ he said, his sharp tone just a little bit embarrassing, Alice thought, in company like that. ‘Thank you, Valerie. We will accept with pleasure.’ Alice had noticed in the past that he possessed a manner bordering on old-fashioned gallantry with her mother, even though he behaved like a stingy old tyrant with his own poor rag-and-patch woman. Was that because her mother had an indigo eyelash tint and had her hair rinsed ‘champagne blonde’?

  ‘But, dear,’ wheedled Mrs Fergusson miserably. ‘There’s Mother. You know she won’t be left with anyone, even if we could afford a sitter. She’d have one of her turns at the very idea.’

  ‘Left?’ said Mr Fergusson. ‘Left?’ Like a bird, Alice thought, pick-picking at a worm in a flowerbed. ‘Who said Mother would be left?’

  ‘But Brian, dear,’ Mrs Fergusson crooned abjectly. ‘Valerie did say six. “A table for six”. Now six would mean three Pillings, if Alice comes, plus you and me and Flora – but perhaps Flora wouldn’t mind …’ Mrs Pilling accepted that they had beaten her.

  ‘My arithmetic!’ she said, feigning error. ‘So sorry. A table for seven, to be sure.’ Alice wondered at the time how her mother meant to square the event with her father, who was fond of society in general, but he did like to choose his own and the elderly person in question was hardly one of his favourites. ‘A table for seven,’ her mother repeated, and her voice seemed slightly to lack conviction. ‘Until tomorrow then. Harry and I will call for you at eight.’

  * * *

  The evening began every bit as badly as could have been expected, as Alice watched the elder Mrs Fergusson climb ungraciously into her father’s new estate car, reeking of Woodbines and stale urine.

  ‘And why ever they did away with the old running boards,’ she said, ‘I myself will never know. Grappling hooks is what I shall need to get myself into this monstrosity!’

  She was wearing a peculiarly nasty old anorak, Alice observed. It was spilling out bits of its quilting through several cigarette burn holes along the forearms and she wore it over a pair of evil-smelling emerald-green flares which were encrusted with mud around the bottoms of their twenty-four-inch trouser legs.

  Neither was the restaurant particularly suitable, given that it was the choice of Alice’s mother, who inclined towards culinary novelty and was therefore bound to favour a place like The Fisherman’s Grotto – a newish establishment, which preeningly laid bare for its diners the workings of its open-plan kitchen and chose to underline the freshness of its cuisine by scorning a printed menu in favour of reciting waiters. These made virtuoso monologues of the day’s somewhat fussed-up provender. It materialized as a technique suitable only for frequent dinersout like Alice’s parents and did not go down at all well with the uninitiated or with the hard of hearing. As for Alice and Flora, they were left feeling like failures at Listening Comprehension.

  The Pillings’ waiter, who could not but perceive these difficulties, was none the less thoroughly proficient in recitation and loath to play down his facility. He produced his catalogue with lightning speed, glanced disdainfully at the lesser clientele, and began all over again. The old woman extracted a waxy-looking ear trumpet from her handbag and clapped it to her left ear.

  ‘Is there a decent Scotch broth in the house?’ she quizzed unpleasantly, once the waiter was halfway through his soliloquy. Unhappily, there was not.

  ‘But the fish soup,’ said Mrs Pilling coaxingly. ‘That sounds nice. Try it, Mrs Fergusson. Try the bully-bess.’

  The food took a great while to come, since the restaurant, for all its pretentious trappings, was manned by two affected young women in lycra footless tights who had the look of ballet-school drop-outs run to ample haunch. In the interim the girls drank Coke which filled their stomachs with air bubbles and took away their appetites. Their mothers sipped modestly at sparkling white wine. Mr Fergusson and Flora’s grandmother were in the meantime revealing a wholly unexpected enthusiasm for neat Scotch whisky which they called to have replenished with remarkable frequency.

  When it finally appeared, the food could hardly have been more unsuitable. Flora, who could bolt gristle without batting an eyelid, now flatly refused to eat her trout because it came with grilled eyes, while her father, who had ordered a plateful of mussels in sycophantic emulation of Alice’s mother, appeared by then to be too drunk to lift his fork. Alice suddenly noticed, to her very great surprise, that Mr Fergusson had given over his attention to fondling her mother’s knee. The old woman, meanwhile, having slurped her way loudly through less than half a plateful of bouilla-baisse, had abandoned the activity in favour of lighting Woodbines which she stubbed out into her mussel shells.

  In the midst of this, Alice was both touched and embarrassed to observe her father manfully making a stab at conversation. Possibly in order to rescue his wife by attempting to divert Flora’s father from lechery, Mr Pilling had fixed upon a topic which was closest to his heart and was directing his discourse relentlessly at Mr Fergusson.

  ‘Bricks!’ he was saying. ‘ ’Course there’s a lot more to getting the little blighters from A to B than you might think, Mr Fergusson. And when I remember the yard’s deliveries in the old days! Way back now, Mr Fergusson. “Delivered” is hardly the word. Avalanche, more like it! Tipper lorries belching ’em out in clouds of filthy red dust! Oh dear, oh dear! And all those hours spent sorting out the broken ones. And nowadays, eh? Look at ’em nowadays, Mr Fergusson! There they come, clean as a whistle. Plastic-wrapped. ’Course it’s all metric packs nowadays. All centimetres these days.’ He sighed as he contemplated the radical nature of the advance. ‘Never a broken brick in sight, Mr Fergusson. Not these days. No fuss. No mess. My lads wouldn’t know a broken brick from I don’t know what. It can make you think, Mr Fergusson. Progress, eh?’

  Alice thought that Flora’s father wasn’t even trying to look as if he was listening. Anyway, bricks wouldn’t ever make Mr Fergusson think. He was much too weedy. He spent all day with old manuscripts. It crossed Alice’s mind suddenly that Flora’s father looked like a butter bean. He was as washed out and concave as a butter bean, only not so starchy. He was like one of those butter beans that one grew on saturated cotton wool in junior school. The kind that went wrinkled and shed its thick white skin. Only Mr Fergusson was saturated in whisky. He was looking white and wrinkly as if he was about to shed his skin. Snakes also shed their skin. Mr Fergusson was being quite horrible and slithery, the way he was sucking up to her mother. Perhaps he was more like a snake? And he hadn’t even touched his mussels. They were all going to waste.

  Alice saw her mother edge her thigh away from him with an effort at good humour and direct Mr Fergusson’s attention to his food. Her mother was looking lovely, Alice thought, in her elegant trousers and ivory silk shi
rt. She wore two gold bracelets on her wrist and she had gold earrings and shiny eye make-up. Alice felt no compulsion to emulate her mother in this respect, but she did feel proud of her; proud that her mother had so much drive and glamour; that she had the resources at the end of the day to take so much trouble and give pleasure with her appearance.

  ‘Come on, Brian, eat up,’ she said. ‘Your beautiful shellfish. Look. Your mussels are all getting cold.’

  When Alice went to the ladies’ room, she had been preceded by Flora and her mother. It perhaps explained why they had not seen her enter and cross to one of the loos.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Flora,’ Mrs Fergusson was saying. ‘You know very well he can’t abide the woman. Vulgar little body that she is – and poor Mr P. hardly capable of signing his name—’

  ‘I want to go home,’ Flora said. Alice was frozen wretchedly behind the door of the loo.

  ‘We can’t go now,’ said Mrs Fergusson. ‘Besides, your father likes a nice pudding.’

  When Alice returned to the table, it was just in time to see that Mr Fergusson had begun to eat. He had evidently made a greedy rush upon his plate, because the mussels were almost all gone. At the same time, the old woman rose from her seat. She pursued a giddy course between the tables towards the ladies’ room, but unfortunately the voluminous trouser-hems defeated her. The emerald-green flares, having slipped an inch or two, had become twin booby traps. Alice watched in horror as Flora’s grandmother began to walk up the insides of her trouser legs. Then, before anyone could stop her, the old woman fell, groaning and cursing, in a drunken heap on the floor.