Human Croquet Read Online Free PDF

I’m sitting up in my bed. It’s not so much the compact, nor even the words, it’s the pink face-powder – it smells sweet and old, it smells of grown-up women and it is – without a shadow of a doubt – the evocative topnote in the scent of sadness, L’Eau de Melancholie , that trails so disconsolately at my heels.
    ‘Well anyway,’ Charles says, ‘I think it’s hers,’ and he pockets it moodily and leaves without wishing me happy birthday.
    A little later, Gordon pops his head round my bedroom door and attempts a smile (even then my father manages to look sad), and says, ‘Good morning, birthday girl.’ I don’t say anything to him about the powder-compact, it would only plunge him into greater gloom and is unlikely to jog his memory about his first wife, for nothing else seems to do. Perhaps in his seven absent years in the downunderworld, Eliza was erased from his memory cells by aliens? (This is Charles’ theory, needless to say.) But then this is a man who even forgot who he was himself, let alone his immediate family. (‘But isn’t it wonderful that your daddy’s alive and well?’ Mrs Baxter said. ‘Why it’s like –’ Mrs Baxter searched for the right word, ‘it’s like a miracle!’) Yet when he came back – walking in the door as casually as Anna Fellows did in 1899, he remembered who we all were perfectly. (‘Isn’t that a miracle,’ Mrs Baxter said, ‘suddenly remembering who he was after all that time?’)
    He hands me a cup of tea and says, ‘I’ll give you your present later,’ the words more cheerful than the tone in which he says them (it was ever thus with my father). ‘Have you seen Charles anywhere?’ This is another peculiar trait of my father’s – he is constantly questioning people about the whereabouts of other people – ‘Have you seen x?’; ‘Do you know where y is?’ – even though the person he is looking for can easily be found in their usual habitat: Vinny in her winged armchair, Debbie in the kitchen, Charles lost in a Bradbury or a Philip K. Dick, Mr Rice doing heaven knows what in his room. Once, in her early days with us, Debbie knocked peremptorily on Mr Rice’s door, duster and polish at the ready, and turned on her heel and came straight out again when she saw what he was doing. ‘What?’ Charles asked eagerly but Debbie refused to say. ‘My lips are sealed.’ If only her nose could be stopped up too.
    I myself am usually to be found lying on my bed imitating the dead Chatterton, killing time by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds I’ve discovered so far).
    ‘I expect Charles is in his room,’ I tell Gordon and he makes a surprised face as if this is the last place he expected him to be.
    Gordon would perhaps like Charles to make more of himself, but says nothing. After all, Gordon is a man who has succeeded in making less of himself. He was once a quite different person, heir to our own personal retailing fortune, the licensed grocery business of Fairfax and Son – an inheritance scuppered a long time ago by carelessness. Fairfax and Son, now called ‘Maybury’s’, is at this very moment being converted into Glebelands’ first supermarket and about to rake in profits for someone else, not us. And before that, before he was a grocer, Gordon was someone else again (also in the time of myth – 1941), a hero – a fighter pilot with medals and photographs to prove it. Once a bright, shining person, he came back from his seven-year sojourn a faded man, not really ‘our dad’ at all.
    ‘Perhaps it’s not really Daddy at all?’ Charles conjectured quietly at the time. (For it’s true neither the exterior nor the inward man resembled that it was.) But if it wasn’t him then who was it? ‘Somebody pretending to be Daddy – an impostor.’ Charles explained, ‘Or like in Invaders from Mars where the parents’ bodies get taken over by aliens.’ Or perhaps he was from the parallel world. A looking-glass kind