Enchantment Read online

  His son, the son he had wanted born first, not last, and strong and manly instead of – well, his size was not his fault, but other things were – was lolling at the table while his poor mother did all the work.

  ‘’Lo, Father.’ It was a current affectation among Wallace’s children to call him Father in a derisive way, as if he were something the cat had dragged in. ‘How’s it going?’

  Before Timothy had even finished the question, he had obviously stopped listening.

  ‘I finished two salad bowls, if you’re interested.’ Wallace stood looking down at the irritating top of Tim’s small head. ‘Why didn’t you come earlier? I wanted you to do a bit of hand sanding for me. Was that too much to ask?’

  ‘You shouldn’t have stayed out so long, Wallace,’ Annie said, in the comfortable way she tried to soothe people down if she could see they were a bit upset. ‘It’s getting dark.’

  ‘I couldn’t see a bloody thing. Nearly cut my finger off, if you want to know.’

  ‘Oh dear, let’s see.’

  You could come in with half your thumb hanging off, and she’d still coo at you as if you were a two-year-old with a scratched knee.

  ‘It’s all right.’ He snatched away his hand. ‘No thanks to working with sharp tools in that bad light, waiting for this young man.’

  ‘His name is Tim,’ his wife reminded him, ‘and he’s only just got back from working hard all day.’

  Implying her husband had done nothing. But I’ve worked more Saturdays than my children have had hot dinners, and that’s saying something with this mother who buys love with food. Out all weathers on the housing sites. Mud and clay up over your boots, from cutting the first sod to tightening the last door handle. Everything that went wrong was always my fault, and I’d to answer for it. Floods, electrical blow-outs, poor workmanship, the lot.

  ‘Just back from work?’ he tapped the back of Tim’s head with the handle of his penknife. ‘You go to the shop in jeans these days?’

  ‘I went home to change.’

  ‘Must have clocked off early.’

  ‘One of us always gets off early, Fridays and Saturdays.’

  ‘How was it?’ Wallace did not sit down. He needed the height over his son.

  ‘How was what?’ When he looks up at you with those woolgathering eyes, and his ears and adam’s apple sticking out, you wonder whether your genes went astray.

  ‘Work, of course. Or don’t they call it work, nancying about with satin and scissors?’

  ‘It was all right.’

  ‘Was it, though? Funny thing. I was in Webster’s this morning.’

  ‘I thought you went to the library,’ Annie said.

  ‘I did, and when I’d looked up the Victorian napkin-ring design, I went on to pick up some socks, at Webster’s robbery prices. Walked right through the stuffy stuff department, for a laugh, and never saw my son.’

  The subject blushed like an August dahlia. ‘I was on my coffee break.’

  ‘How do you know? I’ve not said what time I was there.’

  ‘Well, he must have been,’ Annie said, turning round from the oven – and she could hold her own in the red flush stakes too, but of course you were going to get that, at her age – ‘else you’d have seen him.’

  ‘I don’t believe he was at work.’ Something prompted Wallace Kendall to say that, although it could not have mattered less, one way or the other.

  Tim got up. ‘I don’t believe you were in the store.’

  ‘Now, boys, you’re being very silly.’ Annie moved to stand between them, but she had to put down a saucepan first, and then it took her so long to come across the room that her husband had moved away to the back hall, and was stepping out of his overalls. He put his hand in the pocket of the old working jacket that he used to wear on site. It was on a hook under Tim’s anorak. (The boy always had to hang his coat on top of yours, just to annoy you, when there were hooks free.) He took out the new lipstick that he had picked up from the floor of the car after Sarah had taken it shopping.

  ‘While I was in Webster’s,’ he said loftily, ‘I bought a little present for m’wife.’

  She was thrilled, poor woman. She smeared it on in the mirror that she had put up behind the larder door, because if someone was at the door, she couldn’t run upstairs.

  Tim tried to say, ‘We don’t sell that – that – that brand.’

  ‘How do you know? If you’re doing such a slap-up job in Fabrics as you claim, what are you doing mooning about in the Cosmetics Department?’ Timothy was standing on the painted stool, getting something off a top shelf for his mother. ‘Looking at girls?’ Wallace gave him a jab in the waist with his strong craftsman’s forefinger.

  Sarah asked, ‘New lipstick, Mum?’

  ‘Ye-e-es.’ Annie spread her full lips, now much too bright a red. ‘Like it?’

  ‘It’s a change from your pink.’

  ‘Your father gave it to me.’ She brought the new lipstick out of her apron pocket.

  Mine. ‘Where did you get that, Father?’

  ‘In Webster’s.’ Sarah’s father gave Tim an ugly sly look. What was he up to? Tim, drinking sherry by the sitting-room fire, turned away and put the glass on the mantelpiece.

  Leave Timmy alone. Sarah often wanted to pummel her father. In the past sometimes she had.

  ‘Wasn’t it nice of him?’ Whatever was going on, Annie was unaware of it.

  ‘If you decide it’s the wrong colour for you, Mum – no, don’t get insecure, I’m not saying it is – let me have it. It’s the same as the new one I bought the other day. And lost.’

  Sarah looked at her father, but he had lit a cigarette and was bent double in the armchair, coughing.

  ‘Hot cooked celery is an aprodaysiac,’ Tim said, boldly for him.

  ‘Aphrodisiac.’ Valerie leaned forward and gave him her stare, framed in glasses with dark square tops, like eyebrows. She ran a play school for handicapped children, and went with a fellow who was working for a degree in psychology, so of course she knew.

  ‘How do you know?’ Sarah asked Tim.

  ‘I read it somewhere.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oh, somewhere.’ Tim always went vague if you pinned him down, even if he had the answer, so you never knew if he was telling the truth or not.

  ‘In that book I lent you – London Lechery?’

  Sarah’s father put down his knife and fork to pronounce, but he was hungry, so he picked them up again.

  ‘I don’t know. It said that the celery’ – Tim took up a limp length on his fork – ‘gives off these sort of pharaoh … chemical whatnots. Like dogs and insects, when they – they’re in the mood.’

  ‘Better not have any, then, Sarah,’ Wallace Kendall bantered, with amazing wit. Perhaps there was hope for Little Hitler yet.

  ‘I told you, the name is Zara.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘Yes, that. If you don’t want me to call you Wally, you can remember my name is now Zara.’

  Sarah had been in trouble in the last few years. After she had finally left the bastard she was living with and been through treatment to get herself off drugs and alcohol, she had announced, ‘A new me, name and everything. I don’t want anything of the old one.’

  Perhaps Wally was mellowing towards her because she was going to a friend in Australia for several months. She could go to pot Down Under to her heart’s content, and he would not have to know about it.

  Tim did not want her to go. Sarah-Zara was the sister he needed. Valerie, ‘the clever one’, had always been a witch to him. Even after she cut her stringy black hair and had wires pulled round her teeth to make her look less like a vampire, Val had always made him uneasy with her stares and criticisms and general air of knowing more and liking less about him than he did himself.

  ‘You still content with your little bed-sitter?’ she asked him after supper.

  ‘It’s a flat,’ he said, ‘a studio flat.’

  ‘And you’re
an artist. It’s a dingy bed-sitter. One of these days, I’m going to come up there with a pot of paint and do up those khaki walls in frosted white.’

  ‘I like it how it is.’

  ‘No, you don’t, it needs brightening up. Colin and I have been helping Helen Brown to do up her place. It’s done wonders for her.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Zara asked suspiciously.

  ‘Nothing. She’s a bit lonely, like a lot of separated women who think they want freedom, but then can’t use it.’

  ‘So Tim ought to meet her,’ Zara said. Val was always trying to fix him up with her stray dogs.

  ‘Why not? He can’t go on like this, not having any girl friends. He’s getting very introverted.’

  ‘Leave him alone.’ Zara, who Tim ought to have protected from all the evils that assaulted her, was always the one who defended him. ‘Don’t talk about my Timmy as if he wasn’t there.’

  ‘Well, half the time he isn’t. I’ll ask Helen round some time, Tim, and you can just happen to drop in.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Val …’

  ‘Got sisters?’ Pocket Pickups asked. ‘Use them. Statistics show that 1.5 men out of 4 make exciting relationships with girls who were introduced by their sisters.’

  ‘You go, Tim,’ his mother said. ‘I’ve met Helen once, with Val. Her husband was in the merchant navy, wasn’t he? Perhaps she needs you.’ Her eyes brightened to a saga. ‘She’s been badly hurt by this dreadful drunken sailor and needs a white knight to rescue her. She sits alone’ – the relishing intake of breath – ‘alone at the window of her poor basement flat –’

  ‘Go it, Mum, she’s on the fourth floor,’ from Val.

  ‘Looking up to the sunlight and wishing she could live again. I daresay,’ Annie invented, ‘the poor soul cares for a crabby widowed mother, but there are dozens of perfectly comfortable nursing-homes about, I don’t know why people make such a fuss.’

  Before he went home, Tim put his arms round his skinny younger sister, and hugged her.

  ‘I wish you weren’t going away, Zara.’ He always remembered to call her that.

  Zara pushed back her front hair. She had thick curly hair that hung forward, so that she could push it back, and let it fall over her face again.

  Holding her hair, she scanned his face alertly. ‘Shall we have a cry?’

  He shook his head and looked away.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Zara said, ‘if you can pay the registration and insurance, I might let you use my car while I’m gone.’

  ‘Your car!’ Tim pulled away from her. He wanted to prance about hooting, with his knees up.

  ‘So much for brotherly love.’ His father came into the hall from the basement stairs, where he had been listening. ‘Won’t miss her now, will he? If he’s expecting to swank about in that little yellow rust-bucket, he’ll be scared to death that mongrel drug pusher from Barbados will come sniffing round again (hot celery, eh?) and persuade her not to leave.’

  Zara threw a punch at him, and he caught her wrist and held her off while she tried to kick at his legs with a bare foot.

  Her mother said, ‘Wallace – really!’ and laughed. Relentlessly thinking the best of everybody, she took him with a grain of salt, and believed everybody else did too.

  She had never really rumbled Little Hitler.

  Brian and Jack had gone to bed, but Tim still slunk past their front bay window like a marauding cat. He sprang up his own outside stairs like the lean runner going up those endless steps in white socks to, touch the Olympic torch into flame, with the whole world watching, and fell into his nest, his cave, his dun-brown burrow.

  It was on the table. The envelope from C.P. Games with his play-by-mail entry forms, and a note from Brian on a scrap from the waste-paper basket.

  ‘Sorry. Found this in with ours.’

  He had been up here. What had Tim left lying about? He took a quick look round. Nothing private.

  Sunday tomorrow. Tim could sleep late. With an expectant sigh, he opened the envelope and settled down to steer cunning, persuasive Blch, silver-tongued story-teller with a despot’s heart of steel, through the perils and pitfalls of Domain of the Undead.

  Chapter Three

  After two or three weeks, Valerie did ring him about Helen Brown. Val and Colin had tickets for a musical show at the new theatre in the town, and the friends who were booked with them could not go. She had invited Helen. Would Tim like the other ticket?

  ‘I don’t know, Val,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to look at my calendar.’

  ‘Come on, Tim,’ she said, as if she knew he hadn’t got one. ‘You know you love the theatre.’ He did. In the summer he was going to volunteer again at the Boathouse, the little repertory theatre down by the river.

  ‘All right, then.’ At least it was a musical. If he had to sit by this Helen person, he would be wrapped round in music and not have to make conversation.

  She was not much in the talk line herself. They all had pizzas before the show. Helen Brown sat across the table and hardly looked at Tim. She ate her pizza slowly, with sticky cheese on her narrow chin, and listened to Colin holding forth. She was short, which was just as well, quite a lot shorter than Tim.

  Helen had unassuming biscuit-coloured hair held back with a stringy bit of ribbon, not smart, by Webster’s haberdashery standards, but better than the great harsh-toothed clips the girls stuck in their heads, which they might whip off in a flash and use to crush your knuckles.

  Tim thought she was older than he was, and she had been through this marriage to the drunken sailor, and the turbulent shoals of a separation or a divorce, but it did not show on her. She was not your experienced divorcee. Nor was she your hapless maiden yearning to be rescued by a white knight. She was quite old-looking, to tell the truth, and quite ugly. Bits that should be big, like eyes and mouth and bosoms, were small, and bits that should be small were big.

  At the theatre, Val told Helen to go down the row first, and Tim hung back, hoping that Colin would go next, then his sister, then him, on the aisle. But Val pushed him in next to Helen, and then went to the bar with Colin. Helen did not want to go, so Tim stayed. They had to wait in their seats for quite a time, getting up to let people through who had timed it better. After they read their programmes, he had to say something.

  ‘Have you known my – Val – my sister long?’

  ‘I used to see her quite a lot. I had a little boy in her play school.’

  ‘Oh?’ Most of Valerie’s customers were screwed up, above or below the neck.

  ‘He’s in boarding school now.’

  ‘Oh.’ He must have grown out of it, whatever it was.

  She had spoken without turning her head, looking towards the stage where the curtain waited to reveal delights, quivering slightly at the bottom, a bulge appearing here and there at elbow or buttocks height, like the stomach of a pregnant woman.

  ‘So you live – I mean, you’re on your own.’ Keep calm, I’m not a rapist. I just sound like that.

  ‘When I’m at home. I’m employed at the Hall School.’ A teacher? She did not look or sound like one. ‘Do you know it? I’m in the housekeeping department.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Fair.’ She made a face that did not improve the shape of her nose and mouth. ‘It leaves me free weekends and holidays when Julian comes home.’

  Well done, Tim. ‘Ask her to tell you about herself’ (Pocket Pickups). ‘No girl can resist that. She’ll think you’re sensitive and understanding.’

  She’ll tell you a few boring things and then shut up and read her programme again. Val and Colin had come back from the bar, but were talking earnestly together, in the way they did. Now Helen should be asking Tim about himself.

  She didn’t, so he cleared his throat. ‘I work at Webster’s. I expect you know it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m in Fabrics and Soft Furnishings. It’s a –’ It’s a what? A drag, a fine store, a bore, a challenge, nest of
thieves?

  She waited, the flattish front of her grey-pink jumper going mildly up and down as her narrow ribs breathed.

  Two women in black ducked through a hole under the front of the stage. Thank God, the orchestra was coming in. Young men, grey men, competent girls, old bags with cellos. Tim and Helen watched while they tuned up in that wonderful carefree discordance, and then the conductor came out of the hole and summoned a crash of sound, and the disembodied voices started and the curtain went up, and Tim’s senses were invaded by swirls of colour and sound.

  Once, when he looked down, he was quite surprised to see the reality of Helen’s grey wool lap beside him, her hands lying together like dead leaves. He looked at her to see if she was enjoying the show. She wasn’t looking at the stage. She was looking at him.

  Help! Did he look ridiculous, carried away like that? But she was not laughing at him. She looked rather glum.

  The package from C.P. Games revealed that Domain of the Undead had progressed quite a bit since Tim last sent in his movement sheets. The ploys of his disguised warlord character Blch, to infiltrate behind the desecrated graves and burst coffins which were the front lines of Necrotic’s ghoulish army, had succeeded, but so had the slaughter waged by giant maggots on the churls who kept the Pass of Perish.

  ‘Your back-up party now has only a dozen plus-2 weapons and three mage spells,’ said the message from Kevin Sills, who ran the C.P. office end of this game. ‘It has been said that men with heads of beasts have been seen in the dead oak forest behind you. In the mountain hexes ahead, those whose super power points have not doubled will not get through, or die trying to.’

  Using the map, Tim now had to find a way round the heaving bog, or go underground through the catacombs, where booby traps of foetid gases could turn you into a dybbuk and you would have to pay another five pounds to start the game again.

  Some characters had disappeared, as other players got sick of them, or were killed off, or dybbuked, or ran out of money. Some new characters had turned up, to complicate the struggle for conquest, and Captain Necrotic seemed to have played a dirty trick by metamorphosing into the living human form of the Black Monk, once trusted by the people, but now a diabolic traitor.