RIVERING - Sixteenth

Where's 'Mum' - and whose mum is she?

SIXTEENTH

Gerald knew only too well that the tiniest slip-up might upset the entire apple cart. He'd been congratulating himself on having charmed Marjorie Jackson into keeping quiet. Sometimes you just had to sleep with these women. The Press loved nothing more than a scandal and she, no less than he, a man of law and a pillar of society, needed nothing less than negative publicity, close as she was to the P.M. When his secretary had passed on Marjorie's husband's, Patrick's telephone message, his heart had skipped a beat and when his accountant had dropped in to see him just fifteen minutes later he had found him steadying himself, pouring Famous Grouse into one of two rather fine crystal stubbies he kept in the filing cabinet with it.

'Ah. Peter, will you join me?' he'd asked the numbers man. 'Swifty?'

'Thank you Gerald. I won't thank you but carry on. I'm, err. It's a bit, err, even for me'

'Oh don't talk in code old man. I know what you mean. 10.30. Yardarm. All that but I've had a bit of a shock. Let’s...' Gerald gestured to the two bucket chairs at the low round table and the two men moved to sit side by side as Peter the accountant laid flat two sets of figures, one showing monies in (the simplest of the two lists) the other outgoings.

'I'm afraid it's not looking too good, Chap,' Peter warned Gerald. 'The taxman's not going to be at all happy about what we are recording as your 'essential monthly outgoings'. I mean, I know it's far too soon in the year to start concerning ourselves with returns and such like but, err, '

'What?'

'It's rather indelicate of me Gerald, but umm. I must, umm. I'm afraid and you mustn't imagine any form of moral umm, on my part. We are two of a kind. Men of the world but the thing is, I'm, err...’

'Oh for Christ's sake Peter,' snapped the angry man of the law, 'spit it out! Spit it out!'

'It's these three monthly payments: two to the Bournemouth trusts,'

'Yes? And? For God's sake Peter. Those have been running for 17 years. 17 years and you've never said a dickey bird. Why now?'

'Sorry, Chap. It's this third you see? To the United Oxford Hospitals which you set up only this September. This third, should we put it down as 'essential', means that, what with all you already claim for lunch, travel and general expenses, I'm afraid it will look like you are running at a deficit.'

'Jolly good. Jolly good,' spat Gerald gleefully. 'No bally tax for the taxman then. I really don't see what you're worried about, Peter. Old boy. Peter. Eh? Sure you won't have a nifty swifty?' He had broken into a sweat as he'd turned to his filing cabinet to top up his stubby glass.

'The thing is, Gerald. You are going to have to pull the plug on one or other, perhaps even two of your lovely gals. You just cannot go on paying out; not to all three or you really will be bankrupt and we can't have that can we?' Peter had crossed a line.

'Gals? Gals indeed. So that's what you think of me, hmm? Huh? What? Gals. Don't you judge me by your own standards, Chap. Gals, indeed. Well, if that's what you think. And you're right, Peter. You, like all your clan, dull, dry, fusty, number -crunching, specky types fuss far too much. Fuss, fuss, fuss. I don't pay you to fuss. Now, fuss off and leave me to my day. As a matter of fact it's people like you that prevent people like me from getting on with the serious work of the moment and making some decent lolly to pay your sort, barging in here bothering about silly little sums. Now go! Enough. Good-bye. Good day.' Gerald dismissed Peter, buzzing his secretary to add injury to insult, saying, 'make sure Mr Williamson's off the premises before you come up, Elspeth, won't you?' draining his glass.

Nicola, later that same day, home early from a gruelling week’s work, grateful it was at least Friday, and just about warm enough, her glass cool in her hand, watching condensation run down the inside of her conservatory windows as the cat worried backwards and forwards with her kittens, had very nearly not moved to answer the door, a fierce knocking, a reminder that she ought to fix the bell. She'd expected to find only a neighbour after a cup of sugar. Tea. Not her father. She didn't recognise him at first. It had been, well. Seven years, she supposed since that last time. When they'd moved. Molly just ten.

'You can't come in,' she'd said.

'I think you'll find I can,' Gerald had insisted, pushing the door hard open, inwards, trapping his daughter between it and the side of the counter behind, 'see?' and moving to close the door, despite its sticking, finding Nicola there still, as if petrified, had simply added and quite gently, 'we need to talk,' showing that in fact he was not all bad as he handed her a beautifully woven globular basket, full of the most exquisite fruit the season had to offer. 'Any chance of a cuppa, Nicky, sweets?' It wasn't the end to the week Nicola had hoped for and yet it did help her, in some ways, draw a line.

Poppy had drawn a kind of Venn diagram, hoping she might somehow work out what was going on. She felt, as Gerald did too it seems, that all of life might come crashing down should just one missing piece of the jigsaw show its face. Her father had said it was all a bit like a game of 'pick-a-sticks'; you could only be winning for so long until the structure, the complex system of stresses and strains, came crumbling down. Poppy couldn't risk making a deliberate change to anything, knowing that even though she could and perhaps should offer her resignation and leave her weekend job, the whole of life was somehow balancing, pivoting and all were only just somehow managing to stay afloat. She dare not rock the boat and in truth, she found work, traumatic as it was, helped her to see beyond the few, narrow but albeit harrowing concerns of life as it was lived in the villages of the river valley. She'd been happy enough, on that Saturday, the first after her visit to Bournemouth with her lovely daddy, to put on her grey uniform and sit amongst the greying lost, on grey chairs in the grey-glossed rooms of the riverside asylum's so-called 'Therapeutic Community'. John was there too.

'I thought you were on long stay?'

'Me too,' she'd smiled, glad at least that he was there.

The morning's psychodrama was harrowing. Someone, orphaned and incarcerated since her adoptive father had signed forms citing, 'immoral irrationality' as the justification for her detainment, had been picked on by the psycho-dramatist to play the central role in a piece he'd devised on 'contracts made within families'. He'd savaged her.

'Orphan. Ah. How sad. Little Orphan Annie. Ah. Give it up, everyone. Everyone say, 'ah poor little Orphan Annie. Ah,'' he'd insisted and because he was a charismatic despot, and all players and audience members alike objectified, they did. Everybody, except John and Poppy, sneered at once, 'poor little Orphan Annie' bearing down on her as she cowered, living again the bullying she'd endured for just about long enough, but not quite, since once she'd found herself pregnant, to whom she'd no idea, her adoptive parents had signed her life away, forcing her to endure an abortion at 16, and committing her afterwards to what seemed an eternity, under section, in so called 'psychiatric-care'. Poppy and John, thinking of Molly, Nicola, Rory, and 'Mum' who they still had yet to find, found themselves in-equal to their roles. The Psycho-dramatist had hauled John over the coals, discrediting him, labelling him, 'some thick village boy who thinks he'll just cash in on the sick of the local hospital; double pay is it Sat'dys?'

'I'm in training, actually.'

'Training for fucking what boy? Tea boy?'

Poppy had watched this interaction remembering how the self-same self-styled psycho-therapist had narrowly averted getting his head knocked off by a flying chair on her very first day in the job. How such sick sadists kept their jobs without being called up before tribunals, she'd never know and when John and she had mentioned it to John's dad that afternoon he'd said, 'sorry, kids.'

'We're not kids' snapped John, the issue with men in power weighing heavily.

'Sorry. Poppy and John,' the union man corrected himself. 'Doctors. Fucking power freaks most of them,' prompting John's mum's usual,

'language, Love. Language.'

But Poppy could see he was right. She'd spent most of the day with so called 'Orphan Annie' after the psycho-drama event, carefully massaging Atrixo into her chapped hands, lighting her cigarettes; listening while others in the ward cried, walked up and down, banged on the office door demanding handbags, watches, pictures of their children, gaining no purchase on their own lives. But when she'd burst into tears, her 'Annie' had soothed her saying, 'come on Poppy; don't you start. It'll all end somehow. Sometime. Somehow. All of it. Sometime. Somehow,' but as Poppy had asked John just that very evening, as they'd taken the long way round from John's home and the comfort of his mother's soup, to the boathouse, 'how? How will it end? Everything and I mean just about everything is hanging by a thread, balanced on a knife edge, pivoting on the edge of the weir about to be plundered, rushed downstream and drowned.'

'I don't know, my Poppy Pops,' sorrowed John. 'I don't know but I do know it's got little to do with us. In fact I can't quite fathom how we've got ourselves tied up in all this,' he admitted as they wondered at a tangle of reeds, twigs and mossed fallen branches that had clumped together to form a raft which moved round and round in the river's currents, moving very gradually down stream, while the river fowl slept and Poppy rolled the last of the summer's home grown grass, harvested from the greenhouse there, just beside the tap.

Nicola had by then, by the time that Poppy and John had bedded down in the boathouse on the Saturday night; by the time her father had returned to his London flat, and by the time that Rory had been persuaded to find a way to join her on the Sunday, had just arrived just before midnight at her lodgings in one of the Oxford colleges, her father's own.

Poppy's father Patrick had before then, having knocked on the door of the odious lawyer's London flat, been more or less minked to death by Gerald's Phoebe, who'd welcomed him with promises him that 'Dear Gerald' would soon be there which of course he was, just as Patrick had agreed to a glass of Riesling.

'Patrick? Patrick?' Gerald had had a very long day, the train from Bournemouth having no buffet car, 'Riesling? Christ no. No thanks Pheebly. Just, my usual, Darling, please. Thank you,' he'd said as if he were a man with manners, throwing his coat at a hook and falling into a chair. 'And what might I do for you, pray, Patrick?'

'Well. It's about your wife,' said Poppy's daddy, watching as Phoebe seemed to glide across a minked carpet, minked herself and ghostly, hovering Gerald's whisky over the round occasional table to his right.

'Not your wife then?' sneered Gerald.

'My wife?' Patrick was non-plussed. 'No. No. No. Marjorie? Gosh no. I know exactly where she is. If she's not in the kitchen she's in the Con club. No, Gerald. I'm afraid, and sorry, err, sorry, err,'

'Phoebe' said Phoebe to whom these errs were addressed.

'Yes, sorry Phoebe but we really ought to know, don't you think, precisely what has happened to Gerald's wife?' Phoebe blushed and moved towards the kitchen to break eggs and dig about in the bottom of her handbag, still yet trying to locate that missing earring.

Violet and Sid had been disturbed by Mrs Jackson's interrupting them just as the Val Doonican show was drawing to a close. It was late, for them and they'd been having quite a long debate over the fire. Violet felt her Sidney should have lit it and he had insisted it was too soon in the season and quite warm enough as long as they kept the curtains closed tight but of course Mrs Jackson's coming in just then had somehow swayed the debate in Violet's favour, bringing in with her as she had, the cold.

'Of course you're welcome Mrs Jackson,' Violet had insisted, moving her gently with a dirt lined arm so that she might pull the curtain across the door, 'Sit down, won't you?' she'd invited but of course the stateswoman wouldn't 'take a pew' as Sid had urged, gesturing to the hard oak chair alongside the table under the window.

'I won't. I can't stay. It's just I've arrived home rather late. You know. The roads. They've all got a car.'

'Not us, Mrs Jackson. Not us,' said Sidney. 'The bus does us quite nicely, and your husband,' leaked Sid, Violet shushing him.

'My husband, yes, my husband,' prattled Marjorie, moving her weight from one foot to the other. 'I don't suppose. I mean. I know it's a funny question but do you know where he is, by chance?'

'I do,' said Sid.

'No you don't,' said his Vi

'I think you'd better tell me, Sidney, don't you?' suggested the imperious politicians' moll.

'Well I,' blushed Sidney adding, 'it's warm enough now, Vi, Mrs Jackson, isn't it? We don't need no fire just yet, do we?'

'Fire?' Mrs Jackson was easily wrong footed.

'Now the nights are drawing in,' explained Violet. 'Are you having one Mrs Jackson?'

'Well, no. Not tonight. I don't think. No. My husband does the fires.'

'Men's work,' agreed Sid. 'Men's work.'

'Right, well if you won't stop, Sidney and I were just going to have a cup of something warming and turn in, Mrs Jackson’, explained Violet, skilful in her manoeuvring of the woman behind the curtain, through the inward opening door and out into the night. 'He'll be home soon enough, won't he now?' said Violet who knew everything, and of course he was, walking slowly across the railway bridge, through the village, its pubs by then dark for more than an hour, and over the two bridges, pausing to listen to the river, swell with recent rain, and on up the high street to the crossroads and his home..

Molly, pouring over all the leaflets, booklets and complex information the kind feminists of her progressive college had been able to provide, and long into the night, hadn't expected visitors on the following day. Sunday. Her landlady, having climbed all three flights of stairs and puffed out insisted, huffing, 'you must come down; you know I don't admit unsolicited visitations but I has to say this one; blimey; I thought; blimey Molly's aged a bit then I thought, oh no. She's telling me now. I could hardly listen or hear for the likeness, you'll see. There's someone here. She says, well. Will you come down to her now? Bring your key! She says she'll be taking you out, for breakfast, late as it is now,' noting Molly's wearying, 'if you've the time. You must have time. A girl like you left all alone. It's wrong now hurry along'. And having reached the bottom of the stairs, on finding Nicola there and although at first she didn't know her, and Nicola her neither, the pair had fallen one into the other on the threshold as the landlady, flustering urged them to decide, 'well are you in or are you out now?' moving them, edging them with stealth towards the cafe across the street, where Rory waited.

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INDEX