It wasn’t nearly as good as the special loom Wendy Keach had, whose shuttle you could flip over one-handed, but she wasn’t about to let me have a go on that. In the end I settled for the Flying Hats. There’s a picture of Lord David Astor bending down to give me my prize. He owned the Observer newspaper. He didn’t like Cliveden very much, I don’t think. He certainly didn’t spend much time there.
Mum and I played Flying Hats as best we could, though I was still as much of a Dropper as I had been when Miss Reid gave me that name, after having to pick up so many pens and pencils. Mum wasn’t supposed to move more than the minimum, so if we dropped hats a nurse had to retrieve them. It’s not a very thrilling game at the best of times. At the end of it, though, Mum hugged me, in the barely-touching way she’d mastered by then, and said, ‘We do have fun, don’t we, John?’ It was so out of character it gave me the shivers. Everyone kept on and on about how she glowed, but what if I didn’t like the new light in her eyes?
I said I had to go to the toilet, partly as a way of testing this new Mum, to see if there was any trace of the old one left. The old Mum would never have let the word ‘toilet’ pass, but this new one just said absently, ‘Of course you must,’ and promised not to take her turn at the game until I had come back.
Audrey. The new baby was called Audrey. It was a girl. Good news. Lucky Mum. She was tucked away in a cot, snoozing.
Later Audrey woke up and a nurse handed her to Mum. This little baby was a stranger. I felt she had nothing to do with me — but the woman who held her was also a stranger. I felt that Laura Cromer had disappeared and been replaced with a substitute, one who could only have fooled people who didn’t really know her, like the nurses on the ward. Despite a superficial resemblance, this person had nothing in common with my mother. She had already seemed strange while the baby was inside her, but having the baby taken out had left the strangeness still there. It hadn’t brought Mum back. I felt sure that Dad would feel the same way when he saw her, but he greeted her and the new baby as if there was nothing unusual going on except having a new person in the family.
While new motherhood was still working its alarming miracles on her, Mum made a suggestion to me. She’d heard that Sister Heel was going to retire, and she knew that Heel was unmarried and lived alone. How did I feel about giving her Charlie as a retirement gift? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? My first reaction was to think, ‘What a cheek! Give away your own blooming budgie!’ But she had done that already, when she gave him to me. She couldn’t help herself. She was baby-happy, swollen with the joy that a new life brought.
Even so, the moment she said it, I knew it was the right thing to do. I’d already said good-bye to Charlie once, after all, when I first went to CRX. If the only thing I wanted for Charlie was to see him happy, then happy he certainly was, and he made his mistress Heel happy into the bargain. The truth was that I had grown out of him rather, quite apart from the fact that for all practical purposes he was Heel’s already. Handing him over for good would be a legal detail. I was only transferring title.
I still had to nerve myself a little. It was another irrevocable change, even if I was making it happen myself. My voice even cracked when I asked her whether she would like to take Charlie with her as a retirement present. Her voice almost didn’t work for a moment. She was close to tears. The dragon had long since unmasked herself and we were almost friends. Then she said that she would be honoured.
Soon after that she was logging off on her last duty, walking quietly out of the ward. She had warned us that she hated good-byes and would rather everyone behaved as if it was the end of a normal day. Except for the birdcage in her hand, of course. That wasn’t normal.
I wasn’t very good in those days at following people in my mind when they left the room. There seemed no end to their options — it was dizzying. Perhaps as an ex-toddler confined to one room, I was slow to learn that if you leave a space you must enter another one (the whole thing is an illusion, but the illusion is roughly consistent). It wasn’t that I had thought of other people as toys in a box to be put away. I felt like a toy in a box myself, that no one was allowed to play with. Still I found my mind could follow Sister Heel, budgie cage in hand, all the way home, right up to the moment when Charlie hopped into her mouth at last. He need never come out again.
I soon got my old Mum back. Audrey wasn’t the sort of baby to sleep through the night if she could help it. The unreal or just unfamiliar light began to die from Mum’s eyes.
After that, Mum had her little girl. She had what she wanted. If she still wasn’t happy, it wasn’t a matter of there being something actually missing from the pattern, more that she didn’t have the knack.
I hadn’t seen much of Peter for a while, but that began to change when he came to see the baby and decided it would be fun to take charge of my wheelchair. I was very happy to have a chauffeur. He found it heavy work at first, so we just pottered round the CRX grounds. He wanted to find a secret passage — he was sure it was just the place to have one. The best we could find at short notice was a manhole cover that hadn’t been put back properly, so that it lay at an angle. We decided that this must be the entrance to an underground labyrinth. It was far too heavy for Peter to lift. The Famous Five would have made a better job of uncovering a mystery.
Peter got quite a taste for pushing me around, though controlling the Tan-Sad, when I came home at weekends, was much more of a challenge. It must have been about this time that some adjustments were made to Trees which made life easier for me and for everyone else. There was an L-shaped bedroom annexe, with a ramp. Even so, the extension was always a bit bleak. There was no carpet, for fear that the Tan-Sad would track in mud from outside. There was just lino. I told Mum I had seen enough lino at CRX to last me a lifetime, but she was adamant that she didn’t want to spend all her life cleaning up after me. There was a utility room, too, so Mum also benefited from the re-modelling, and a second bathroom on the ground floor, so that I didn’t have to be carried upstairs to have a bath.
As Peter grew more skilled at handling the Tan-Sad, we began to make little expeditions round Bourne End. It was rather unnerving, being stared at. At CRX I was often invisible, which wasn’t always a bad thing, and when I was out with Mum her adult aura neutralised curiosity. I don’t know whether it was worse for me, protected from noticing most of the stares thanks to the immobility of my neck, or for Peter who was spared nothing. I don’t think it was much fun for either of us.
There were compensations, of course, times when we could stare in our turn. One day we saw a dog with its head in what looked like a loudspeaker — actually a ruff to stop him scratching a healing wound or biting out stitches. We thought it must be a joke or some strange sort of advertisement. As if the dog from the record label, listening raptly to recorded sound, had finally climbed into the gramophone to find out where exactly His Master’s Voice had taken up residence. We thought it was killing.
In the open air the whole business of pushing and being pushed worked against conversation, but when we stopped for Peter to get his breath back we had some fine chats.
He had obviously been giving my situation some thought. ‘You should go to an ordinary school,’ he said. ‘— you can come to my school if you like. It’s all right. Except you’re getting too old.’