Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson Page B

and groan (which she did in a very ladylike way, everyone agreed), the guard thinking that the way she said Darling, you’re an angel showed she was a First Class type anyway. It was difficult to know what to put on Charles’ birth certificate. He was a philosophical conundrum, like Zeno’s arrow, a paradox on the space-time continuum. ‘Where would you say he was born?’ Gordon asked, when he was next home on leave. Why, First Class, darling, Eliza replied.
    Charles, sadly, was rather ugly. ‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ declared the Widow, the mistress of the baffling cliché.
    Eliza, however (naturally, being his mother), declared that he was the most beautiful baby that ever existed. Charlie is ma darlin, she sang softly to a nursing Charles, who stopped the suck-and-tug at her breast long enough to smile a gummy smile up at her. ‘What a smiley baby,’ the Widow said, unsure whether this was a good or a bad thing. Eliza bounced Charles on her lap and kissed the back of his neck. Vinny unclamped her lips long enough to say, ‘He’ll be spoilt.’ How wonderful for him, Eliza said.
    Gordon came home on leave at last and met his son, by now freckled like a giraffe and with a carrot-coloured tuft of hair sprouting from the middle of his large, bald head. ‘Red hair!’ Vinny said gleefully to Gordon. ‘I wonder where he got that from?’
    ‘He’s a sturdy little chap, isn’t he?’ Gordon said, ignoring his sister. He had already fallen in love with his red-haired son. ‘He doesn’t look a bit like you,’ Vinny persisted, as Gordon carried Charles around the house on his shoulders. ‘He doesn’t look like Eliza either,’ Gordon said and that much, certainly, was true.
    Then Gordon had to go and fly through the greyer skies of Europe. ‘You would think’, Vinny sneered, ‘that he was fighting the Luftwaffe single-handed.’ ‘Nerves of steel,’ the Widow said. A man of iron. Heart of gold, said Eliza and laughed her bubbling, rather frightening laugh. Before the end of his leave Gordon had managed to get another baby started ( an accident, darling! ).
    ‘You’ll keep an eye on Eliza, won’t you?’ Gordon said to his mother before he left. ‘How can I not?’ she said, her syntax as stiff as her back. ‘She’s under the same roof, after all.’ In the bathroom, damp and steamy, the Widow had to brush through a forest of Eliza’s stockings hanging everywhere and wondered how this could be part of her duty. And another thing, the Widow thought, how did she get these stockings? Eliza was never short of anything – stockings, perfume, chocolate – what was she doing to get them? That’s what the Widow would like to know.
    ‘At least this child won’t be born on the move,’ the Widow said to Eliza. The Widow was worried that Eliza might be thinking about the Turkish Baths in Harrogate or a day-trip to Leeds. Eliza smiled enigmatically. ‘Bloody Mona Lisa,’ Vinny said out loud to herself as she smoked cigarettes for her lunch at the back of the licensed grocery.
    Eliza drifted into the shop, as pregnant as a full-blown sail. She sat on the bentwood chair reserved for weary customers next to the huge red, gold and black tea-caddies with their faded paintings of Japanese ladies, big enough to hide a small child in. Eliza pulled Charles on her knee and sucked his fingers, one by one. Vinny twitched with disgust. He makes me laugh, she said, and as if to prove it she laughed her ridiculous laugh. A lot of things made Eliza laugh and not many of them seemed very funny to the Widow and Vinny.
    The Widow ran her dust-seeking fingers over the black bottles of amontillado, checked the moulded butter-pats (thistles and crowns), the bacon-slicer, the cheese-wires. She rang sales into the huge brass till, as big as a small pipe organ, with such ferocity that it flinched on the solid mahogany counter. Straight as an ironing-board and almost as thin. Her skin as pale as pale can be, like white paper