Mother’s Boy, page 8
‘Be careful with that cleverness of yours,’ she warned him. ‘Sometimes the clever thing is not to seem too clever.’
He looked quite shocked, peering at her over his spectacles like a much older man. ‘You mean I should give a wrong answer on purpose? Wouldn’t that be lying?’
She was baffled. To have produced the sort of child who came top of the class was so entirely unexpected and not at all in the family’s sturdy tradition of muddling through.
‘Just don’t boast,’ she said. ‘Nobody likes a clever clogs.’
‘All right,’ he told her, but she could see she had troubled him.
She was relieved when he turned out to be only average at arithmetic but still hoped he would develop a love of kicking or throwing balls or catch the obsession with trains or cars that had reliably seized every small boy she had ever known.
That afternoon there were children out playing on the hill as usual, making the most of the time left them before the unofficial five-minute curfew bell rang out from St Mary Magdalene’s. Laura was greeted by the skinniest two, to whom she regularly slipped buns before school when their desperate mothers weren’t looking, and greeted a couple of others. Charles was not among them, not even with the small band of tough girls in Polly Venning’s gang, who regularly co-opted him when they needed someone to be the man in their impenetrable games of make-believe. Sometimes she overheard one of them bossing him around, her mother in miniature, and was ashamed to realise how strongly she didn’t want him to grow up to marry any of them.
Her hot feet were swollen and aching from the walk but she was then drawn into a chat with a neighbour who was using the washhouse, who needed her advice on how to remove a persistent fruit juice stain.
She knew something was wrong because Jack hadn’t barked and run downstairs to greet her. Since Charlie’s death the dog had transferred his primary allegiance to Charles, for whom he had been known to wait at the school gates on letting-out time, but he recognised Laura as the provider of food and mistress of the range.
Charles must have heard her talking because he already had the kettle heating and a teapot set to warm just as she had taught him. But instead of greeting her with the usual chat as she took off her coat and sank into her chair with a sigh, he kept his back to her at the table, deep in some book or other. The dog lay protectively at his feet and only thumped his tail in greeting.
‘And how was your day, Mother? Oh, fine, thank you,’ she said. ‘Though I spent it on my knees.’
But he said nothing and turned a page. She saw his face was only inches from the paper.
‘Where are your spectacles, Charles?’
‘In my room,’ he murmured.
‘Well, you can’t read with them up there. You’ll ruin what’s left of your eyes squinting like that.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘It is not.’
He read on, hunched low over his book. The kettle boiled. She pushed herself back to her feet and noticed, as she went to pour it on the tea he had already spooned into the pot, that he shifted his angle as he read, to keep his face from her.
‘Charles?’
‘It’s nothing. It’s fine.’
‘If it’s nothing then you can show me. Charles?’
With a heavy sigh he took his hands away from his face and looked at her.
One eye was so puffed shut from bruising it was a wonder he could read at all. He must have been using one hand to hold it open. The other eye was blackened as well. There was every sign his nose had been bleeding and there was a nasty cut between his eyebrows.
‘I fell,’ he told her.
Leaving the tea to brew, she ran a basin of cold water, added some salt and soaked a flannel in it for him.
‘Press this across your eyes,’ she said. ‘It’ll help the swelling go down while I find the witch hazel. So what happened to your glasses?’
‘They fell off and someone trod on them. By mistake.’
‘Ah.’
Her hand shook as she reached for the witch hazel. It wouldn’t do to let him see that she was upset. As she turned from fetching the cotton wool as well, she saw him carefully wet the flannel again, wring it out, fold it very precisely then lay it back across his eyes. It was a gesture somehow heartbreakingly adult, like watching him solemnly polish his shoes or make his own bed with hospital corners. He had learned both things from Charlie.
She poured them each a cup of tea, putting sugar in his for the shock. Then she pulled up a dining chair beside his and soaked a little pad of cotton wool with witch hazel. She had no idea if it had any medicinal powers beyond being mildly antiseptic but she had always believed it was good for bruises and the smell of it – fresh and clean – seemed to have stored up in it the precious moments of comfort and intimacy from her girlhood, moments when her mother was able to stop her labours and briefly focus lovingly on Laura.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Let’s clean you up, my bird.’ She lifted the flannel off his eyes and gently dabbed at the cut on his brow, seething at whoever did this to him. She had a good idea who. ‘Might sting a bit.’ He winced a little but let her continue. ‘Brave soldier,’ she said, discarding the dirtied pad and making up a new one he could hold there in its stead. ‘Bit better?’
He nodded. She had already become so used to his little owlish glasses that he looked defenceless without them.
‘Are you hungry?’
He nodded.
‘I’ll get something on then,’ she said. ‘Just how bad are they, the glasses?’
He looked thoughtful. ‘They can probably be bent back into shape,’ he said. ‘But one lens is cracked and the other is scratched.’
‘Could you see the blackboard without them?’
‘Not very well.’
She sighed. ‘Well, we can’t have that. Bring them to me and we can take them up to Mr Keast tomorrow and see what he can do.’
Charles fetched them with such reluctance she knew they had not been stepped on by accident. She showed neither her anger nor her sorrow, since neither would help him. That he had not cried and not told her all about it was a sign he preferred the matter dealt with discreetly.
She worried sometimes that his life was too quiet. His cousins, she knew, would often play games after supper but Charles was always content to sit quietly beside her with a library book, as he did tonight, while she knitted or darned or read as well. And she had to confess it was very peaceful and easy living with him. Once he began going to the library, which was only a few doors away, she did too, having never found the courage to before. While Charles was rapidly working his way through the few shelves of children’s books, she was rediscovering the innocent pleasure of romance novels, finding their formulas and moral certainties soothing after a hard day.
When Charlie collapsed after insisting on swimming with the others at the annual church picnic, she had realised he was not hers to keep. That night, and for his last year, she took to sleeping in the child’s bed, not simply because Charlie’s night sweats and restlessness made him impossible to sleep beside, but because she had accepted she now had to put the boy’s health before her own happiness and be ever vigilant lest the TB be passed on to her or him. She still lay on the double bed with Charlie sometimes, but from that awful evening until the night he gasped his last, almost as the old year did, the balance of their little family shifted and she became closer to the son than to the father.
She knew this for a terrible thing, almost a sin, damaging to both of them, but could see no way to set things right again. And once Charlie died she and Charles became all in all to each other. Hints were dropped, of course, especially once she put aside her mourning. Well meaning, her sisters nudged other men her way – a tanner, a sawyer, an auctioneer’s clerk, quiet Douglas from the Padstow line – all of them older, mostly widowers, but it seemed to her that any grown man who needed nudging, who couldn’t shift for himself, was likely to prove just another person to tend and mend, like Charlie but without the balm of desire. For all that she relished romance on the printed page, her private dreams had never been of love and marriage.
The stamped-on glasses were the first thing Laura saw on waking, for she had left them on her bedside table with her library books and the ladylike travelling alarm clock Stanley had sent her for a wedding present. There were Saturday chores to be dealt with first – their own weekly laundry to be sorted and left to soak, and Sunday’s Communion bread to mix and knead and leave to rise.
She took quiet satisfaction in the weekly baking of a loaf the two of them would barely taste, using the same tin, dimpled with a crucifix, her mother had acquired from the church baker before her. She liked the sense of contact it restored with her mother as she was kneading and liked that it was something she could do for the Church without fuss or show. It involved no meetings or committees and no going cap in hand to others. She baked the loaf each Saturday and left it, still warm and wrapped in one of two white linen cloths, prettily hemmed and embroidered with a small blue cross by the same old baker who had passed down the tin.
Charles’s bruises had blossomed overnight so that from one side he might have been a highwayman. She told him that and he seemed pleased and went to admire the effect in the washroom mirror. He was coming to love disguises and dressing up.
His Saturday chore was to sweep and dust his room and put clean sheets on his bed, so it was easy enough for her to slip out to the road after setting the first lot of laundry to soak and have a quick word with one of the skinny girls there to confirm her suspicion as to who his tormentor was. She said nothing of this to Charles but simply called him to join her for a trip to the shops.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ she told him when he dragged his feet. ‘Everyone’s seen a black eye before and they’re not to know you didn’t give as good as you got. Anyway, Mr Keast may want to see you in person when I take the glasses in. Come along, Charles. I’ve got things to do and we can go to the library on the way back. You know how you like that.’
She need not have spoken with the skinny girl. Charles’s reaction as they neared the butcher’s was confirmation enough. He knew as well as she did that Joseph, the butcher’s son, helped out behind the counter on Saturdays.
On Charlie’s first visit once they were engaged, he had been amused at how Launceston’s tradesmen all resembled their Happy Families equivalents. The bakers seemed dusted with sugar and spice, the fishmonger’s family shared an unfortunate appearance, fat of lip and rolling of eye, and Luke’s, the butchers Laura favoured, in between the grand one, which seemed to charge extra for wrapping the meat in striped paper and counting the local gentry among its regulars, and the one that smelled of blood rather than sawdust and had a problem with flies, could only have been butchers. They were a ruddily healthy family, tow haired and red cheeked, broad of brow and loud of laugh, and given to jostling one another like so many bullocks at a trough. Regularly winning prizes for their bacon and sausages, they were handsome and had the daunting vitality of people who knew themselves popular. They made Laura feel shy. She knew the wife slightly from school where, as a slaughterman’s daughter, she had always been at pains to be ladylike. She had the perfect job now, perched on a high stool, shielded by a window from the bloody business around her, taking people’s money and smiling down on them as she passed them their receipts.
The shop had a fine position at the junction of the two streets looking down towards St Mary Magdalene and the Lower Market House. Through its windows, with their uprights like barley sugar twists, she guessed Mrs Luke enjoyed the sense that she was presiding over comings and goings; little escaped her beady gaze.
Charles enjoyed trips up to town with Laura, for all his reluctance to leave the house that morning. He was alert to any stories relating to the old buildings they passed. Now that he had realised the picturesque ruins where he often went to play or to read quietly in the sun were the remains of a Norman castle he was looking for history everywhere. But this morning he stopped chattering about the old gallows and executions as they came within sight of the Lukes’ sumptuous window display. When he was very small, she had trained him to keep hold of her skirt when they were out together or, once he was older, her arm. She was touched that now he had outgrown such babyishness he still sometimes rested a hand on her elbow when he was talking of something that fired his enthusiasm. He had been doing that this morning, as they walked and he told her about dungeons and something nasty called an oubliette. So she noticed when he suddenly withdrew his hand and held back.
‘I’ll be waiting over here,’ he told her and gestured towards the piano shop, which had always drawn him as other boys were drawn to traction engines.
There was only a short queue, so she had time to nod good morning to Mrs Luke and note that Miss Luke was becoming broad in the beam. She saw the son spot her in the queue and promptly look busy. He was a good-looking boy, like a Roman soldier in a church window, just the sort of boy any mother would like her son to befriend. Then she realised his father was waiting to serve her and she couldn’t help picturing, as always, his huge forearms studded with cloves like a brace of Christmas hams.
‘A pound of skirt, please, Mr Luke,’ she stammered. ‘And six of those Lincolnshire sausages.’ In no time he had the beef and sausages wrapped in waxed paper for her. ‘And half a pound of lamb’s liver,’ she added, aware of the women now queuing behind her and glancing across to see Charles watching her forlornly from across the street. She was glad he had stayed outside; he hated scenes.
‘And your lamb’s liver,’ said Mr Luke. ‘Anything else?’
The son was busying himself retrieving a rabbit from the game rack with a hook on a pole. With a speed and dexterity amazing in one so young, he chopped off its head and paws, then tugged off its skin like a glove.
‘Yes,’ she said, and made herself meet his father’s babyishly blue eyes. ‘I shall need these mending.’ She clicked the spectacles on to the counter between them. ‘Boys will be boys and Charles’s bruises and cut forehead will soon heal but on the little I make and a war widow’s pension I can’t afford new spectacles more than once a year.’
There was a tutting sound behind her. Then one of the other women said, ‘Look. There he is. Poor little mite. Looks like a badgern.’ And everyone in the shop turned to look across the street at Charles, who was gazing, oblivious, at a piano being tuned in the window.
‘What do you have to say for yourself, Joseph?’ Mr Luke asked.
Still clutching the rabbit and looking as though he might cry, Joseph said, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Causley.’
Mr Luke thrust the broken glasses under his freckled nose. ‘These come out of your pocket money,’ he said, and slapped the back of his head with his other hand so violently the rabbit flew out of the child’s grasp and was caught in her basket by the customer waiting for it.
This caused a burst of laughter under cover of which Laura said, ‘Please don’t. It’s hitting him has taught him to hit others. I’ll take these to Mr Keast, then.’
‘Have him send me the bill,’ Mr Luke said, handing her back the ruined glasses.
‘Thank you.’ She turned back to the boy. ‘He didn’t tell me,’ she said. ‘He kept quiet. It was one of the girls. He’s half your size. It’s not his fault he comes top in a test or two.’
‘Sorry, Mrs Causley,’ the boy repeated.
Mrs Luke took Laura’s coins with studied politeness and a glassy lack of focus and Laura wondered whether she might have to transfer her allegiance to the butcher’s with the blood smell and the flies.
She told Charles nothing of what had passed in Luke’s but joined him at Hayman’s shop window where they watched the tuner play a final flourish before fixing the front back on the piano to hide the workings that had so fascinated him.
‘What did you say?’ he asked.
‘A pound of skirt, please, and six Lincolnshire sausages.’
‘Are those the herby ones? I like those.’
‘Which is why I bought them. Come on. Into Mr Keast’s before he shuts for the weekend.’
Mr Keast, a kind man, took one glance at Charles’s face and didn’t need to ask why the glasses needed mending. As the lenses would need a few days to make up, he fitted Charles with what he called ‘emergency’ ones. They were tortoiseshell, more expensive than the simple wire ones he’d be repairing. ‘If you’re getting into any more fights,’ he said, ‘I’d appreciate you folding them carefully back into their case first. Can you do that?’
Charles nodded and smiled, opening to any fatherly kindness as he always did, like a flower to sunlight.
All errands run, they called in at the library. Laura’s new book was easily selected. There was a shelf marked ‘Romances’ and she picked one she didn’t recognise, but Charles was suffering his usual agonies of indecision as he was allowed only three books and they had to be the right ones.
‘Can I leave him to browse?’ she asked the librarian, assuming she’d say certainly not, and she was surprised to see a smile break out on the woman’s careworn face.
‘Oh, is he yours? He’s no trouble. Not like some of the tykes we get in here. In a year or two we’ll be offering him a job. Is he an only child?’
Laura nodded. ‘How could you tell?’
‘Well, he always comes in on his own, but also there’s nothing childish about the way he talks. However do you cope?’
Laura saw the way the woman glanced at the romance she had chosen, at her roughened hands, but chose not to be insulted. She smiled. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I just feed and house him and leave the rest to school and you.’
