A Sight for Sore Eyes Read online

  There was no question of Jimmy going. He said it was all a storm in a teacup. Besides, he had just bought a television set, their first color one, and he was watching Wimbledon. A doctor came, very angry, almost disbelieving, and found Eileen lying among her broken waters, chain-smoking. A midwife came. The Brex family, all of them, were furiously castigated and the midwife turned off the television herself.

  The baby, a nine-pound-nine-ounce boy, was born at ten P.M. Contrary to Mrs. Tawton’s predictions there was nothing wrong with him. Or nothing in the sense she meant. The kind of things that were wrong with him were unresponsive to any tests then and, largely, still are. In any case, it depends on whether you belong in the nature camp or to the nurture school. In the seventies everyone who knew anything at all believed a person’s character and temperament derived solely from his early environment and conditioning. Freud ruled okay.

  He was a beautiful baby. During his gestation his mother had lived on croissants with butter, whipped-cream doughnuts, salami, streaky bacon, fried eggs, chocolate bars, sausages and chips with everything. She had smoked about 10,800 cigarettes and drunk many gallons of Guinness, cider, Babycham and sweet sherry. But he was a beautiful child with smooth, peachy skin, dark-brown silky hair, the features of a baby angel in an Old Master, and perfect fingers and toes.

  “What are you going to call him?” said Mrs. Tawton after several days.

  “He’ll have to be called something, won’t he?” said Eileen, as if naming the child was expedient, but by no means obligatory.

  Neither she nor Jimmy knew any names. Well, they knew their own and Keith’s and Mr. Chance’s next door—he was called Alfred—and their dead fathers’ names, but they didn’t like any of those. Keith suggested Roger because that was the name of his pal he went drinking with, but Eileen didn’t like this Roger, so that was out. Then another neighbor came around with a present for the baby. It was a small white teddy bear with bells on its feet attached to a ribbon you hung inside the roof of the pram.

  Both Agnes Tawton and Eileen were quite moved by this gift, said “Aaah!” and pronounced it sweet.

  “Teddy,” said Eileen fondly.

  “There you are, there’s your name,” said Keith. “Teddy. Edward for short.” And he laughed at his own joke because no one else did.

  3

  No one ever took much notice of him. But none of them took much notice of each other. Each seemed to live in a kind of nonclinical autism, doing their own thing, wrapped up in themselves. With Keith it was his cars, with Jimmy the television. Having sold the stuff for years, Eileen developed an obsession with wool and other yarns, and finding knitting unsatisfactory, took up crochet in a big way. She crocheted for hours on end, turning out quilts and mats and tablecloths and garments.

  Teddy slept in his parents’ room until he was four. Then he was moved in with his uncle on to a camp-bed. When he was little he was left for hours in a playpen and his crying was ignored. Both Eileen and Jimmy excelled at ignoring things. There was always abundant food in the house and large meals of the TV-dinner and chip-shop variety were served, so Teddy was amply fed. The television was always on, so there was something to look at. No one ever cuddled him or played with him or talked to him. When he was five, Eileen sent him off to school on his own. The school was only about fifty yards down the street and on the same side, so this was not quite so dangerous and feckless a procedure as it sounds.

  He was the tallest and best-looking child in the class. A Teddy should be rotund and sturdy, with a pink-cheeked, smiling face, blue eyes, brown curly hair. Teddy Brex was tall and slender, his skin was olive, his hair very dark, his eyes a clear hazel. He had the kind of tip-tilted nose and rosebud mouth and sweet expression that made childless women want to seize him and crush him to their bosoms.

  They would have got short shrift if they had.

  Aged seven, he moved his bed out of his uncle’s room. Nothing untoward had ever happened to him in that bedroom. There had been no encounters with Keith, not even the verbal kind. They had seldom spoken. If, in later years, Teddy Brex had had dealings with a psychiatrist, even such an expert would not have been able to diagnose Repressed Memory Syndrome.

  All Teddy objected to was the lack of privacy and his uncle’s terrible snoring, the liquid glugs and bellows that seemed to shake the room and sounded like nothing so much as the water from ten bathtubs roaring down the drain when their plugs have been pulled simultaneously. And the smoke, he minded the smoke. Though he was used to it and had, so to speak, drunk it in with his feeding bottle, in the small bedroom it was worse, the air nearly unbreathable as Keith had his last fag of the day at half-past midnight and his first at six A.M.

  He moved the camp-bed himself. Keith was at work, plumbing a new block of flats at Brent Cross. Jimmy was at work, humping bricks on his hod up a ladder in Edgware. Eileen was in the living room skillfully performing five acts at once, smoking a cigarette, drinking a can of Coke, eating a Crunchie bar, watching television and crocheting a poncho in shades of flame and lime and royal blue and fuchsia. Teddy dragged the bed downstairs, making a lot of noise about it because he wasn’t strong enough yet to lift it. If Eileen heard the bed bumping from stair to stair she gave no sign that she had.

  Nobody ever used the dining room, not even at Christmas. It was very small, furnished with a Victorian mahogany table, six chairs and a sideboard. There was barely room for anyone to get in there, let alone sit at the table. Everything was thickly coated with dust and if you twitched the floor-length, indeterminately colored velvet curtains, clouds of it billowed out like smoke. But because no one ever went in there the room smelled less of actual smoke than any other part of the house.

  Even then, even at seven, Teddy thought the furniture hideous. He studied it curiously, the swollen buboes, with which the legs were ornamented, the brass feet like the claws of a lion with corns. The seats of the chairs were covered in some forerunner of plastic, a black and brown mottled mock-leather. The sideboard was so ugly, with its wooden shelves and pillars with finials, its cubbyholes and carved panels, its inset strips of mirror and green stained glass, that he thought it might frighten you if you looked at it for long. If you woke up in the half-dark or as it began to get light and saw its walls and spires and caverns looming out of the shadows like the witch’s palace in a story.

  That was something to be avoided. He drew patterns with his forefinger in the dust on the chairs and wrote both of the rude words he knew on the table surface. Then he stacked four of the chairs, seat to seat and legs to back, heaved up the last pair on to the sideboard to hide its horrors and made himself space for his bed.

  Keith noticed, but didn’t comment, though he sometimes came into the dining room, smoked a cigarette and chatted desultorily at, rather than with, Teddy about his car or his intention of going down to the betting shop. Probably neither Eileen nor Jimmy knew where their son slept. Eileen finished the poncho, wore it to go shopping in and started on her most ambitious enterprise to date, a floor-length topcoat in scarlet and black with cape and hood. Jimmy fell off a ladder, hurt his back and gave up work to go on the benefit. He was never to come off it and never to work again. Keith exchanged the Studebaker for a Lincoln convertible in lettuce-green.

  People down the street said that Teddy Brex started going next door because he was he was neglected at home. He wanted, they said, the affection, the hugs and the tenderness a childless woman like Margaret Chance would give him. Conversation, too, someone to take an interest in him and what he was doing at school, maybe a clean house, proper cooked meals. Tongues were always wagging busily about the Brex family, those cars, Jimmy’s being unemployed, Eileen’s extraordinary garments and her smoking in the street.

  But they were wrong. Neglected he might be, though he always had enough to eat and no one ever hit him, but he had no craving for affection. He had never received any, he didn’t know what it was. That may have been the reason or he might have been born that way. He was qu
ite self-sufficient. He went next door and spent long hours there because the house was full of beautiful things and because Alfred Chance made beautiful things in his workshop. Teddy, at eight years old, was introduced to beauty.

  In the area of garden corresponding to where Keith Brex kept the green Lincoln, Alfred Chance had his workshop. He had built it himself some thirty years before from white bricks and red cedar, and inside he kept his bench and the tools of his trade. Alfred Chance was a joiner and cabinetmaker and sometimes, in special cases, a carver in stone. A tombstone on which he had done the lettering was the first example of his several crafts that Teddy saw.

  The tombstone was granite, dark-gray and sparkling, the letters deeply incised and black. “Death the Period and End of Sin,” Teddy read, “the Horizon and Isthmus between this Life and a Better.” He had, of course, no idea what it meant, but he knew that he liked the work very much. “It must be hard to get the letters like that,” he said.

  Mr. Chance nodded.

  “I like the letters not being gold.”

  “Good boy. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have wanted gold. How did you know black was best?”

  “I don’t know,” said Teddy.

  “It seems you have natural taste.”

  The workshop smelled of newly planed wood, a sharp, organic scent. A half-finished angel carved from ash, the color of blond hair, leaned up against the wall. Mr. Chance took Teddy into the house and showed him furniture. It was not the first house Teddy had been into apart from the Brex home, for he had been an occasional visitor at his grandmother Tawton’s and had once or twice gone to tea with schoolfellows. But it was the first not furnished with late-Victorian hand-downs or G-plan or Parker Knoll.

  The Brex house contained no books, but here were full bookcases with glass doors and molded pilasters, with break-fronts and pediments. A desk in the living room was a miracle of tiny drawers, an oval table of dark wood as shiny as a mirror was inlaid with leaves and flowers of pale wood equally glossy. A cabinet on shapely legs had painted doors and the design on each door was of fruit spilling out from a sculptured urn.

  “A sight for sore eyes, that is,” said Mr. Chance.

  If there was something incongruous in housing all this splendor in a poky little north London semi, Teddy was unaware of it. He was moved and excited by what he saw. But it wasn’t his way to show enthusiasm and in saying he liked the lettering he had gone about as far as he ever could. He nodded at each piece of furniture and he put out one finger to stroke very delicately the fruit on the cabinet front.

  Mrs. Chance asked him if he would like a biscuit.

  “No,” said Teddy.

  No one had taught him to say thank you. No one missed him while he was next door or even seemed to notice. The Chances took him out. They took him to Madame Tussaud’s and Buckingham Palace, to the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. They liked his enthusiasm for beautiful things and his interest in everything, and cared very little about his lack of manners. Mr. Chance wouldn’t allow him to touch a saw or a chisel at first, but he let him be there in the workshop, watching. He let him hold the tools and after a few weeks allowed him to plane a piece of wood cut for the panel in a door. There was no need to ask for silence as Teddy never said much. He never seemed to get bored either, or whine or demand anything. Sometimes Mr. Chance would ask him if he liked a carving he had made or a design he had drawn and almost always Teddy would say, “Yes.”

  But occasionally came that cold unequivocal, “No,” just as it had when he was asked if he would like a biscuit.

  Teddy liked to look at Mr. Chance’s drawings, some of which were framed and hung on the walls inside the house. Others were in a portfolio in the workshop. They were meticulous line drawings, clean and pure, made with an assured hand. Cabinets, tables, bookcases, desks, of course, but occasionally—and Mr. Chance had done these for his own amusement—houses. These houses were the kind he would have liked to own if he could have afforded anything better than his semi next door to the Brexes. Craftsmen who make beautiful furniture and produce exquisite lettering and paint designs on tables seldom do make much money. Teddy learned this by the time he was ten, which was also when Margaret Chance died.

  These were the days before mammograms. She felt the lump in her left breast and then she never palpated the place again, hoping that if she pretended it wasn’t there it would go away. The cancer spread into her spine and in spite of the radiotherapy she was dead in six months.

  Mr. Chance made a headstone for her grave out of pink granite from Scotland, and this time Teddy agreed that it would be tasteful and suitable to fill the letters in with silver. But the words “beloved wife” and a line about meeting again meant nothing to him and he had nothing of comfort to say to Mr. Chance, in fact nothing at all to say, he had already almost forgotten Margaret Chance. It was to be some time before Alfred Chance worked again, so Teddy had the workshop to himself, experimenting, learning, taking risks.

  No Brex ever went to a doctor. Teddy had never been immunized against anything. When he cut himself in the workshop and Mr. Chance took him to the hospital’s emergency room in a taxi, practically the first thing they did was give him an anti-tetanus shot. It was the first injection Teddy had ever had, but he was silent and indifferent when the needle went in.

  If Jimmy and Eileen noticed they said nothing about it. Keith didn’t notice. The only person who did was Agnes Tawton. “What have you done to your hand?”

  “I cut off the top of my finger,” said Teddy casually, in the deprecating tone of someone admitting to a slight scratch. “I did it with a chisel.”

  Agnes Tawton had dropped in on her way back from the shops and found her grandson alone in the house. She wasn’t a sensitive or perceptive woman, or particularly warmhearted. Nor was she fond of children, but there was something in Teddy’s plight that made her uneasy. It struck her that he was often alone, she had never seen him with a chocolate bar or a bag of crisps or a can of Coke, he had no toys. She remembered the playpen, in which he had so often been corralled like a farm animal. And, making an entirely unusual leap of the imagination, unprecedented in her life—it tired her out, doing it—she somehow understood that almost any mother of a child who had lost the top of his finger in an accident would have told her mother about it, would have been on the phone, maybe in tears. If Eileen, as a child, had hurt herself like that she, Agnes, would have told everyone.

  But what was to be done? She couldn’t make a fuss, tell Eileen, tell Jimmy, she couldn’t stick her neck out like that. It would be interference and she never interfered. There was only one solution. In her experience it was always the answer to everything. Money brought you happiness and anyone who said otherwise was a liar. “How d’you get on for money?” she said to Teddy.

  “Money?”

  “Do they give you any, you know, pocket money?”

  Both of them knew “they” didn’t. Teddy shook his head. He was studying his grandmother’s physiognomy and wondering how it had happened that she had four chins and no neck. When she bent over to unclip the clasp on her big black handbag the chins became part of her chest like a bulldog’s.

  She produced a pound from a red leather purse. “Here you are,” she said. “That’s for the week. You’ll get another next week.”

  Teddy took it and nodded.

  “Say thank you, you little devil.”

  “Thanks,” said Teddy.

  Agnes had an idea that the occasion demanded she put her arms around Teddy and kiss him. But she never had and it was too late to start. Besides, she sensed that he would push her away or maybe even hit her. Instead she said, “You’ll have to come to my house and fetch it. I can’t be running round here at your beck and call.”

  Keith was a tall, heavy man who looked like the late David Lloyd George, with that statesman’s square face, broad brow, straight nose, wide-set eyes and butterfly-wing eyebrows. He had longish yellow-gray hair and a drooping shag
gy mustache. Lloyd George, when young, had been handsome and so had Keith, but the years and food and drink had taken their toll and by now, at fifty-five, he was in a state of serious decay.

  There was something about him that suggested a half-melted candle. Or a waxwork left out in the sun. The flesh of his face hung in wattles and dewlaps. It seemed to have waddled down his neck and sagged from his shoulders and chest to settle in stacked masses on his stomach. He wore his trousers or jeans tightly belted under the huge curve of his rotund belly. The melting, or whatever had happened to him, had left his arms and legs thin as sticks. His dyed hair had receded, but was long at the back and he had just begun wearing it in a ponytail, fastened by a blue rubber band.

  By the time Teddy went to the Comprehensive Eileen had become a notorious figure in the street, more like a bag lady with no home to go to than a housewife and mother of an eleven-year-old son. Dressed from head to foot in homemade woollen garments of rainbow colors—literally head to foot, since she crocheted hats and slippers as well as dresses and capes—her long gray hair fanning out from under the stripy cap to well past her shoulders, she strolled to the shops chain-smoking, often returning with only one item in her crocheted string bag. Then she would have to go back again, and sometimes stop to sit down on someone’s garden wall, smoking and singing early Come Hither hits until coughing put a stop to it. The coughing maddened her, so she gave up the singing and hurled abuse at passersby instead.

  Jimmy went to the pub, he went to the Benefit Office to sign on, and that was about all. He had emphysema, though without benefit of medical attention he didn’t know it, wheezed all day and gasped through the night. Eileen and he and Keith all said smoking was good for you because it calmed the nerves. The walls in the Brex house, and particularly the ceilings, were tinted a deep ocher color, very much the same shade as the stain on Eileen’s and Jimmy’s and Keith’s forefingers. No one ever repainted the house and, of course, no one washed the walls.