Patrick Parker's Progress Page 12

  'You forget that I've got an eye for that sort of thing’ said George firmly.

  'Oh?' said Florence.

  'I used to build structures in Meccano, if you remember.' She burst out laughing, ridding herself of some of her hidden spleen. 'Meccano!' she said, 'Pie in the sky more like.' That shut him up.

  Patrick remembered, fleetingly, taking one apart and putting it back together again in the shed. He might have mentioned it but the memory was not a happy one. He smiled to himself - Something Nasty In The Woodshed.

  George saw the smile and misread it. It didn't do to venture anything in this house.

  Florence said coaxingly, 'Well then - there'll still be plenty for you to do in Coventry when you've finished at college. You could start by building something that doesn't look like an army barracks and I'm sure we'd all be obliged.'

  Patrick went and sat at the table. 'Any piccalilli, Mum?' he asked, picking up another sandwich.

  'In the cupboard,' she said. 'I'm just popping out.'

  They looked at her in astonishment. Four o'clock on Christmas Day?

  'For a breath of fresh air.'

  If George was amazed, it was as nothing to the amazement that the Boxer family felt when they received a personal invitation to the Parkers' for Boxing Day tea. It was the busiest time of the holiday for the pub and Mr Boxer declined. But Ruby and Peggy were delighted to accept. They decked themselves out in their very best attire and walked up. Florence, discreetly placed behind the front-room curtains, saw them coining and put a match to the parlour fire. She switched on the standard lamp, pulled the curtains tight shut, and went out to open the front door.

  Ruby Boxer handed her a Christmas-wrapped gift - 'No prizes for guessing,' she said cheerfully. It was sherry. If George's amazement was high already, the sight of his pledge-signing wife dusting off the little glasses and putting them on a tray on the kitchen table with the bottle winking beside them, took it to new dimensions.

  'We won't,' said Florence, smiling what she thought was a friendly smile and which, in actual fact, had Peggy and George's blood running cold. 'We're teetotal.' The smile, more horrible, widened. Ruby was smiling too. She said that she would, if it was all the same, as she'd been run off her feet. Florence nodded. 'And I'm sure Patrick will join you.'

  Patrick was called down from the bottom of the stairs. And George, taking the opportunity while his wife was out of the room, poured sherry into each of the glasses. And took one. Florence returned. 'He'll be down in a minute,' she said confidingly, looking straight at Peggy. 'He's been drawing. He could do with a bit of livening up.'

  George, top lip poised over glass, nearly choked himself.

  It says a great deal for the agitation taking place in Florence's breast that she ignored George's throwing-off of teetotalism, if she even noticed. 'And you two young things can take your drinks and go into the parlour. I've lit the fire.'

  Ruby smiled at her daughter encouragingly. Florence smiled at her son encouragingly. George smiled into the fire and sipped and said nothing. The two young things picked up their glasses and carried them, very gingerly, along the hall and into the shadowy room where the fire was just taking hold.

  Peggy placed herself just-so on the rug by the fire and sipped her sherry and smiled at Patrick and waited for him to speak. He sat on the unyielding edge of the squeaky couch and drank half the glass straight off.

  'Well’ he said. 'We don't usually have visitors at Christmas. You are honoured.' 'Am I?' she said.

  He drained his glass. And got up. 'Would you like another?'

  She shook her head. Sipping was the ladylike way and she wasn't going to let herself down. Patrick got as far as the door before Florence gave a little rattle of the handle and popped her head round. Her smile, if anything, was even more hideous.

  ‘I brought you the bottle’ she said, handing it to him. 'Your father's got no control.'

  And she was gone.

  'My dad's just the same,' said Peggy. 'I'd like to get out - leave the pub and go to London too. What's it like?' 'Busy’ said Patrick.

  The firelight was playing a halo around her hair and her skirt revealed a pair of very dainty knees. She sipped her drink again and looked at him over the rim. It was an inviting look. But Patrick, in the first full flush of new-discovered manhood, disdained it. ‘I see a lot of Audrey’ he said.

  Somehow Peggy Boxer managed to get the sip of sherry down her windpipe.

  'Really?' she said. 'What's she doing nowadays?' The voice was even and Patrick was lulled.

  'Telephones’ he said. 'Bit dead-end. But she's very bright actually. When she isn't being daft.' He said this last so affectionately that he surprised himself.

  'Are you engaged?' Peggy also surprised herself. The daring of it came from disappointment. She had been led to believe ...

  'Oh no’ said Patrick. 'Just lovers. You know.'

  There - he had told someone. Straight out. Lovers. It was a great word.

  Peggy got up. 'I'm getting scorched,' she said. 'Where's the -?' Patrick waited. Peggy pulled a face. 'Where - er -?' Patrick picked up the bottle.

  'Not that’ said Peggy, so upset she nearly hit him over the head with it. 'Where's the bloody toilet?'

  When Audrey came up to visit, just for a night, which was as much as Florence would allow, and almost more than Audrey could stand, given the way she paced the floor of her bedroom, went up and down the stairs countless times throughout the night, and generally made it clear that there would be no hanky-panky in her house. The weather was so bad that they never set foot out of doors and the general frustration level on everyone's part (except George's) was electric. All notions of taking a cycle ride were abandoned, and the bike and the contents of the shed mouldered on.

  It was the second time that the serpent placed before Audrey Wapshott's nose the irrefutable fact that, if you withdraw the pleasures of the bedchamber from your man, he will undoubtedly be all the keener for them - and - even if only incidentally - you. Love clouded Audrey Wapshott's vision. Or was it love? Might it not be something far more dangerous? Blind adulation?

  9

  A Consideration of Duty versus Genius

  Steg uber der Mur: This combined footbridge and cycle way plays an important role at Graz, as indicated by a local commentator, who describes it as a 'place for humanity, a symbol and a cultural axis for the city, where a tension field between tradition and receptiveness to the new has been set up'. Matthew Wells, 30 Bridges

  The foodstuffs Patrick took back to London with him doubled in volume, and Florence had made him a pullover of the softest, finest wool which would have taken an ordinary mortal months to knit. It was in the colour she thought favoured him best: royal blue. He looked at it for a moment, then at her, and she was worried he might hand it back. But he did not. He bent to kiss her, thanked her, and boarded. There, she thought, as she waved him away on the train, there - his father - old misery he was - couldn't do anything like that for him, now could he? As soon as the train was out of sight of the waving hands, Patrick pulled down the window of his carriage and threw the jumper to the winds.

  'Begone, Dull Bourgeois,' he cried. Then he leaned back in his seat, letting the icy breeze sting his face until a red-faced man in a scarf and hat leaned forward and asked him, very nervously, to close it.

  Audrey met him at the station. They tiptoed past his landlady's door and spent the rest of the day in bed. In the evening, sitting either side of the popping gas fire, sipping beer, Patrick told her about Peggy Boxer's visit. He laughed and laughed about the mix-up over the bathroom (as he had learned to call it) - but Audrey did not laugh. She looked at him. If she was not careful she would lose him -not just because he was handsome - but because he really was somebody. You could feel it when you were with him. Of course Peggy Boxer wouldn't manage it - she was just a silly thing from what

  Audrey remembered - but someone would someday . . . unless Audrey developed into somebody too. 'Teach me everything you kno
w’ she said, leaning forward. He took her straight back to bed. After which he made her tiptoe out into the night. He returned to college in the morning and needed - as he said to her playfully - to rest.

  If Audrey had not been wedged between a large man with several carrier bags and a lolling child, she would have danced down the length of the bus home. Instead she sat there and had a think. How to get on? How to be somebody? She would find a way. It seemed to her that if you loved, you could do anything - just like the best songs and films always said. If Patrick was going to build his bridges, what were her bridges going to be?

  Patrick sent his father a copy of Dylan Thomas's Adventures in the Skin Trade together with a copy of the tape of Under Milk Wood. Florence eyed both these items beadily. 'And just where does he think you're going to find a machine to listen to that muck again?' she asked the kitchen sink, rattling the dishes until she broke one. George said nothing. But he read the book and wrote back that he found it a bit strange but enjoyable. For the first time in his life George received a full letter from his son, addressed to him only, and in his own right. It had news of theatre trips, foreign films, a design prize for the college Gold Medal, part of which was a visit to Tokyo. It gave Florence breathing difficulties while George, delighted, wrote back and suggested that he might consider making a ticket collector's booth for the prize. In his opinion the signalmen were always looked after, it was the poor ticket collector who got stuck in a matchbox and took cold... Patrick wrote back and said he had his eye on something a bit more startling than that. George sighed. The letter ended with 'Love to Mum' - and that was all.

  Florence waited for her own letter. Waited, and waited. No letter came and Florence became ill.

  George nursed her. She became iller when, having written to Patrick that his father made a terrible presence in the sickroom, Patrick wrote back and said that he was in the middle of exams, as well as working on his competition entry, and couldn't return. He sent her a flowery card in pastels and wrote under the sentimental verse 'All My Love Your Loving Son'. Florence put it on her bedside table, continued to grow pale and not to eat and to have what she decided were fits. She wrote to Patrick that she was afraid she might die. Patrick wrote back - hurriedly - and said it was nonsense. That she would be fine. What she needed was a bit of a holiday. Why didn't she and Dad spend a little of their savings and go away somewhere warm? He suggested Morocco and Florence nearly had another fit. 'I'll come up when I can,' he said.

  Florence, beside herself, turned on George. 'And you can get out there to that shed now, George Parker, cold or not. For you're no use to me in here.'

  But since she was lying down, George dared to stand up for himself. 'I'll go out when the weather warms up a bit,' he said. He waited for the heavens to open or the earth to swallow him up. But already Florence's mind had wandered off the subject. Tokyo. The very word on her son's lips made her shiver. It was Audrey who had done this. London was bad enough but it was a means to an end. But Tokyo? She lay in bed and fumed. All she got was another postcard. In the end, since she could not die and see the results in the pain her loss would cause Patrick, she got up again, but her recovery was slow. She was, if she thought about it, grieving for what might have been. She began knitting for him - like a Fury. This time in even finer wool, the thin, beautiful wool she used for him when he was a baby. Maroon. He suited maroon.

  Patrick gave it to the first beggar he found. Audrey was shocked. 'What she doesn't know can't hurt her,' he said, triumphant to be so right. He was right about everything at the moment. His idea for the Gold Medal was brilliant - while everyone else strove to climb Olympus, he would design a children's playground. With the ghost of his father's idea about the ticket collector's booth - he would include a shelter for the mothers - he knew it would win. It would be plastic, and indestructible and cheap. He'd got the idea wandering around Coventry, watching children kicking tin cans along gutters, turning somersaults around bicycle parking bays, hanging upside-down from trees ... Quick, easy, temporary - there were still so many bomb sites unused. If they wanted humanity - they could have it. He was no fool. He knew that designing something for children would touch the hearts of the judges. You had to build up to the heroic slowly. Take them by surprise. If he used Corbusier's primary colours for the structures it would give the project just the right touch.

  He told no one. Not his mother, not Audrey, not his father. Audrey had no idea that on the rare occasions they met (apart from when he sneaked her into his room for a couple of hours) and they went and sat looking at groups of children playing, he was less thinking about starting a family with her, than the basic requirements of the mini-human being in design terms. She sat looking fondly, imagining having his baby - he sat looking fondly imagining how his acceptance speech would go down ...

  'I'm on my way,' he said to her, patting her cold knee. 'What was the worst thing you ever remember about playing?'

  'You wouldn't climb the tree with me.'

  He laughed. 'No - seriously - what?'

  She was being serious actually. 'Falling down,' she said.

  He nodded and thought for a while. Then - 'That's it’ he said ecstatically, 'the final touch. If they like to go head-first then what a playground needs is some form of mock grass, rubber based ...'

  Audrey agreed.

  In Coventry, his moment of rebellion over and feeling quite glad to escape Florence's returned good health and accompanying misery, George set about doing his duty by the shed. He began with Patrick's old bicycle. The surprise he found in the old saddlebag once he had excavated it down to the Roman level (not a spanner or an oil dropper in sight - just old maps, used train tickets, sweet wrappers and assorted rubbish) had him sitting on one of the sacking-covered boxes for a whole evening, wondering what to do, how it had come to be in there, whether his son knew all about everything, what to make of it. It also had him rediscovering that distant land called Hope. After all, he had nothing to lose now -nothing.

  He smoked several pipes, turned the note over in his hands, as if by doing so it would reveal more of itself, and wondered how long it had been in there. Indelible pencil. Smudged but still quite readable. Even on the envelope. He knew the writing and he wondered, his heart making little flipping motions, whether to take up what Lilly said in the note: 'If you are ever passing the door on a Wednesday afternoon you'd be welcome to drop in. We close at one and Alf gets picked up to go to his physio. It would be very nice to see you again.' And then, underlined, she had added, 'I have missed you. Lilly' He had no idea when the note was written but it had been over fifteen years since he had seen her. Perhaps it was best left. On the other hand, Patrick only got the bicycle six or seven years ago. So the note might not have been written that long ago at all.

  'Cleaned out the bike,' he wrote to Patrick. 'Found a few surprises. Your mother still isn't eating properly. Couldn't you come up?' He waited for Patrick's response but there wasn't one.

  In London Audrey decided that a good project to start off with was to get on the right side of her potential mother-in-law. She knew that if she was going to succeed with Patrick she needed Florence. Dolly said she was wasting her time. That no one who came between mother and son would be tolerated. But Audrey thought a little bit of bridge-building of her own might do the trick.

  'You must go to her,' she said to Patrick. 'It will make all the difference and one day away won't kill you.' Truth was she was shocked at his selfishness but she managed to put the thought out of her head. Patrick was a genius and geniuses were different. She preferred to think of it like that. ‘I really think you should.'

  Patrick ran his hands through his hair and sulked and frowned and said 'Would bloody Michelangelo have left the Sistine to visit his mum? Would Pericles have allowed Mnesicles to leave the sodding Parthenon?'

  Audrey said they very probably would.

  'Aud, I'm in the middle of the Gold Medal. It's impossible. I damn well won't.'

  Then she cajoled, enjoyin
g the role which she more or less copied from a Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy film. She liked watching those busy, bossy American women in frilly pinnies telling their husbands how to behave, despite being only housewives. She would be like that. In the end Patrick nodded. 'Oh well,' he said, 'If you think I should.'

  Well obviously I do, she thought. But she just smiled. 'Tell her about your private commission. That'll perk her up.' Patrick nodded enthusiastically. 'That'll please her.' ‘I should think it will,' she said. 'A commission from royalty' 'Not quite,' he said. "The Galtons are only aristocratic'

  And up he went. Just For Twenty-Four Hours, as he told himself over and over again on the train.

  It annoyed him to see how pale and thin Florence looked but after half an hour or so she perked up. 'Audrey was right,' he said, tucking the shawl more neatly around his mother's shoulders. 'She said it would do you good if I came.' 'Audrey did?'

  He nodded. 'She can be quite firm with me sometimes.'

  He said this with a smile. But his mother was not smiling. How dare the girl dictate to her son what he should do about his own mother? Indeed, she grew quite pink at the very thought, and Patrick misreading the signs, patted her arm and added several bushels of salt to the wound by saying. 'Audrey's pretty well always right about little things like that.' He laughed. 'Leaves me time to get on with the important things.'