Grandfather's Footsteps: A Novel by Gillian White | eBook

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Grandfather's Footsteps

A Novel

By Gillian White

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

CHAPTER 1

Who would I most like to be? In the whole wide world, I mean. Who would I most like to be ...?

Thus muses Brenda Hodges, sitting, bored and thin at her desk at the very worst time of the week—nine-thirty on a Monday morning. She's wearing her black New Look skirt—already wrinkled round the bum—and her Dorothy Perkins blouse with the nylon ruffs round the cuffs, which has a tea-stain circular as a penny stamped like a badge underneath her left breast. How did the tea-stain get there? With that perky little overhang of hers, how on earth did it manage to get up under there?

Brenda doesn't know.

Brenda knows nothing.

But a wispy, gossamer Monday-morning feeling tells her that she'd quite like to be Jessica Holden, her boss, who doesn't arrive till ten o'clock and who's never been seen with a tea-stain—or any other stain, for that matter—anywhere on her person. And Jessica is even allowed to bring in her dog.

Clack clack clack goes Brenda, fingering her way across the keys, feeling as green as the screen of her state-of-the-art computer.

Brenda's gran says that some people are born with silver spoons in their mouths. Brenda doubts whether any of the spoons in the drawer at home, even the ones from Jersey, the Isle of Wight, or Majorca, are made out of real silver.

Well, they never get tarnished, you see, and they are certainly never polished.

Jessica's dog has tits like toggles. She is long and lean, a sleek brown sausage with nails that need clipping because she never gets to walk the correct sort of distance on pavements. That is what the vet says. She is a dog for homes and gardens—and you cannot travel far on a patio. Clack clack clack on her tinfoil feet goes Jessica Holden's dog, peering up through cherubic eyelashes at poor, bored Brenda, who glares back jealously through her stiff, mascara-black ones.

When it is winter, Jessica's dog wears a neat tartan jacket, with straps under her belly that regularly get pissed on.

Clack clack clack on her sharp Gucci heels goes Jessica.

Brenda wouldn't be seen dead with a dog like that. If she had a dog it would be a proper one—male, with a studded collar, and preferably a black Alsatian.

'Good morning, Brenda. Any calls? Just give me a minute, will you, and then come through.'

'Good morning, Jessica.'

Oh yes, she's allowed to call her boss Jessica. Everyone goes by first-name terms in the office of Jackson Willow & Sons, Est. 1862, Auctioneers and Valuers by Royal Appointment.

Jessica Holden (she swings, with her hair and her bracelets) doesn't ask herself who she'd like to be—she hasn't the time, for goodness' sake!—but if she did, she'd agree that one of the people she'd least like to be would be Brenda. She doesn't take much notice of her secretary, but if she did she would see chips-and-vinegar skin under bright orange No 7 make-up which stops abruptly at the ring round the neck like a necklace, colourless eyes, greasy hair, and the inevitable stoop, almost a hump, of a low-quality person.

How did the slovenly Brenda get this job in these prestigious city offices in the first place?

She got the job because her shorthand is an incredible 150 words per minute and, so desperate was she for a job, so eager to get herself out of the house, that she allowed herself to go cheap, for almost half that shorthand speed in money.

Wherever you look these days, standards are slipping.

Jessica's dog turns round and round and nests in her office basket. Jessica's dog costs two pounds a day to keep, and that is without the vet's bills. 'Mr Special' is the only brand of food she will touch. She would starve to death if left in a room with only a bowlful of Chappie.

And that is, almost to the nearest penny, what Brenda spends on her twenty Silk Cut.

'It is all a matter of priorities,' Jessica confided to her hairdresser, Bryan, when she went to get her highlights touched up last Thursday. It is irritating to have to keep reading about the poor. And depressing. After all, what can one do? She peered forward approvingly into the rose-tinted mirror, searching for the blemishes that were not there in the way that she searches the park grass with her hand encased in a plastic bag for pieces of the dachshund's solid waste. 'Some people just don't bother to shop around for bargains. It's expensive frozen food, or packets all the time, and grumble, grumble, grumble, while I, well, I take the trouble to pop into Doughnuts after work and pick up all sorts of cheap cakes and buns. And you can make some delicious vegetable dishes by shaking about a few green bits and pieces. Herbs and wine thrown in, of course, to bring out the natural flavour.'

Her legs whisper as she crosses them. She settles behind her desk, she wriggles her bottom into shape and then she presses her buzzer with her beautifully painted nail. 'Coffee I think, please, Brenda,' she says in her cool, cultured voice.

Jessica's not a snob, is she?

I think she probably is.

Her expertise lies in Oriental Art—watercolours of purple mountains, ivory and jade. Jade suits Jessica. It matches her eyes. She will spend the morning preparing a catalogue for the auction next month, and setting up the necessary photographic sessions.

Now, Brenda's gran lives next door to Jessica Holden ... but Jessica doesn't know this.

Holden says the sign beneath her bell in smart italics, but only a milkman's note stuffed in an ill-washed bottle identifies the neighbour next door. Jessica would hardly recognise Brenda if she met her outside the office, for she's never seen her in her outdoor clothes, so why should she know Brenda's gran, shuffling to the post box in hairnet, overall and slippers?

Uneasily, she only knows she lives next door to a rather distasteful person who refuses to make any concessions to aesthetic sensibilities of any kind. But of course, Jessica does not tell it that way, not when people ask her.

'She's a real old character,' she says, but her laugh is hollow. 'Her name is Vera Evans. She's lived in that house for years. Quite an eccentric.'

Jessica is politically sound. So is the virile Rudi, the man with the ponytail and earring, with whom she lives.

The person next door is, frankly, disgusting, not eccentric—a word all too often lightheartedly misused. 'Eccentric' here means dirty, rude, difficult, obnoxious, and smelly. Mrs Evans is old. She will soon die—or the landlord will shift her. And then, Jessica thinks happily, the house will be bought by people of a similar outlook to her own.

Lately, Jessica's house has lost a quarter of its value, but this doesn't bother Brenda's gran. She rents hers, always has. It is expensive to run, though, and far too big for one person. Brenda's gran rattles around inside it with her feather duster like a pea in a pod, achieving nothing. It's a tip.

Number 6, Lippington Road, Pimlico. That's where Gran brought up Brenda's mum, Rita, in the fifties, in the days when they didn't have bathrooms. In the days when the kids used to play in the street and Jack, her coalman husband, used to park his horse outside with a nosebag while he stopped in for his dinner. The house went suddenly cleaner after Jack died. Then Rita moved up the social ladder when she married Derek, and now lives in a pebble-dash house with a garden on the Pennystone Estate—a bus-ride away in Vauxhall, a 70p return.

On a quiet night you can just hear the chimes of Big Ben.

What is the matter with Brenda the typist? She feels slightly sick this morning.

She draws a deep breath.

A little bile comes into her mouth as, carrying the coffee through to Jessica's sumptuous office, Brenda wishes she was back in bed, snuggled up warm round her own smell with her eyes closed and her tea going skinny on the bedside table next to her, like Derek, her dad, does, these days.

'Well, lass, I'm off to bring home the bacon,' he used to say in the faraway days when he had a job and was up at six and brought her a drink before he left for work as a driver for Tesco.

Now, sometimes, he's still in bed when Brenda gets home from work. 'It's the women in this family that keep it going,' Rita says bitterly, after a day in Woollies, rolling down her stockings with her massive freckled arms and blowing on her aching corns. How could such a rough, shaggy woman, built like her father's cart-horse, give birth to a skimpy tadpole of a thing like Brenda?

All Rita's kids turned out tiny.

'It was just the same in Mum's day. It was her who worked in the end, never mind that she'd had seven kids and was worn down to nothing. It was Dad who stayed home rolling his fags and cooking the dinner during the times when his back went. Sampson Shag in the sausages. Sampson Shag in the custard.' She sat back and gawped, spreading her reddened, hammer-shaped toes. 'Look at that one! It's hard like one of those gobstoppers you used to buy. D'you remember, Derek, you used to choose the colour you wanted, out of those big jars. Ye gods, it throbs.'

Dad got down beside Mum's feet. 'That's not a corn, Rita, that's a bunion.'

'That's a bugger, that's what it is. D'you think it'd change colour if you sucked it?'

Brenda lit a fag. 'Put your slippers on, Mum, it's too disgusting to look at.'

'You wait, my girl ...'

'But she's not on her feet all day like you are.'

'No.' Brenda ponders. 'I spend all my time on my arse. So I'll only get piles.'

'And no one'll want to suck those. If you don't smarten yourself up, Brenda—look at yourself, lazy filthy sod, go and wash your hair—all you'll get is the sack.'

'What's for tea?'

'I can't be bothered to cook tonight. Listen out for the chippy van, love, and ask how many want it, Brenda. There's a ten-pound note in my purse.'

Last night's chip paper in its pall of vinegar still overflows from the kitchen bin.

The picture above the fireplace shows a Chinese maiden with long black hair. An Oriental picture. You could not imagine Jessica Holden with a corn, bunions or piles. You could not really imagine she even had a fanny—she was too ornamental for that. China dolls don't have fannies, nor do jade figurines. But she must have a fanny because she sleeps with a man. Rudi. Huh! What a name. Sounds more like a bum-boy to Brenda.

The four-bedroomed council house is full. Even the walls feel as if they're bulging, not with damp, like in Gran's tall, thin, draughty house in Lippington Road, but with people. Most of the kids have left home, failed, and come back to stay.

As far as they could see, there was nothing much better on offer anywhere else.

'Useless, sodding lot.' Mum, wearing her most dangerous look, says she doesn't know how she keeps going and they might as well not have bothered at all, but she's forever grumbling on like that and nobody really knows what she means.

At her desk, Jessica shapes her hand round the flanks of a cool, green Buddha. Last night Rudi, with his dark hair flying, rode her like a horse till the brass bed shook and slammed against the bedroom wall.

Before she reached orgasm the old witch next door started banging again.

Life, eh?

'Pleasant weekend, Brenda?'

Brenda's eyes are dull as dust. 'Nothing much. Just boring as usual.' The bile rises again. The typist controls a sickly burp. 'Where d'you want it?' Only just seventeen, this is Brenda's first job so it's hard not to call Jessica 'Miss' like at school.

'Just put it there please, dear, and you can take away the sugar.'

How the coffee arrives each morning is a bit too much of a lottery for Jessica. Brenda's nails are never too clean. Jessica lifts her eyes and gazes at Brenda—whatever is the matter with the girl?—and suddenly remembers how she read somewhere, was it in The Color Purple, about someone who felt helpless, spitting into coffee to make themselves feel better.

Now what is it about this particular Monday—no different on the surface from any other—that makes Jessica aware that Brenda might actually want to do that? But Brenda should not feel jealous of Jessica, or consider her more privileged than she, for Jessica, like the rest of us, has her fair share of sorrows to bear.

CHAPTER 2

Yes, another boring uncomfortable weekend, same as the last one, same as the next one, sitting round at The Bull with Ginger and Ginger's mates, sipping rum and Cokes and watching him play pool.

What is the matter with Brenda these days?

Why is she so guarded and grumpy?

There's nothing wrong at work, is there?

She hasn't finished with Ginge?

'What time will you be getting in tonight, Brenda?'

Even Shane, who is twenty-five, a father of two, and has been married, is asked this same question by Rita his mother.

'I'll be in when I've straightened my hair and put on my knickers, as soon as I've finished with Ginge round the back of the garages.' But oh no, Brenda does not say this.

What does Rita imagine her seventeen-year-old daughter gets up to with Ginge after the pubs have closed, after the pool match is over?

Perhaps it would be more reasonable were Rita to invite her daughter's boyfriend into her home, out of the cold and wet, maybe allow them to go upstairs and 'listen to records' in Brenda's little back bedroom.

Rita would go spare if any one of her five kids came out openly and declared that they were making love with a member of the opposite sex. A clean-living woman with her mother's values, she expects them to say goodbye to each other at the door.

Has she honestly forgotten how it was?

Is she jealous of their youth and freedom?

Or is she afraid they might get into trouble like she did, get hurt?

They called her 'Big Rita'.

She was born in the image of the coalman, identical to her six older brothers.

In 1955 her father stumbled like an old horse under a sack of coal, and died of a heart attack there on his knees down on the London cobbles.

Like most of the people of that generation, the sixties passed Rita by.

Oh, don't take any notice of the chattering classes.

Or perhaps it was her grieving mother's shadow that somehow cut off the light.

You can live through an era and not be touched by it; you can live through life and not feel part of it ... part of the party that's going on at somebody else's house. But is it really? It certainly wasn't going on at Rita's house in Lippington Road—or anywhere else down the road for that matter.

The most exciting thing that happened between 1960 and 1970 was that Dominic Bassett, an actor from the television, bought Number 18 when Gwenny died.

Dominic Bassett bought Number 18, and for almost two years his suspicious neighbours watched the interesting skip in the road outside.

The sixties and Rita Evans eyed each other from the sidelines. Her brothers were gone and she was the only child left at home. Mary Quant was as far from Rita as the Cavern Club, as flower power, as California, as the pill. She never had any money to spend down Carnaby Street because as soon as she left school and started working in the stores at Moffat's the builders, she had to give all but five bob to her widowed mum.

'Not Moffat's, Mum, please! Why can't I try for hair-dressing, like Patsy?'

'Because I know Mr Moffat and he'll do well by you,' said Vera, 'and it's only round the corner so you won't have to waste money on bus rides, or lunches like Patsy, that flibbertigibbet. You're near enough to come home at one. It's a fair wage, Rita, and you ought to be grateful. Do stop your complaining!'

I won't stay, thought Rita. I'll earn some money and then I'll go. Get a flat somewhere, with a friend.

Ah, such stuff are dreams made of.

Poor Rita came home every night with brickdust in her hair.

'Honest dirt,' said her mother proudly, just as she used to talk about coal as she scrubbed at the rim round the old tin tub.

At Number 18, Dominic Bassett installed two bathrooms. Everyone watched as the burnished copper pipes were carried inside. Everyone marvelled as his old garden privy was turned into a shed.

Awkward, just as she'd been at childhood parties, Rita did not want to join in this teenage game. So much tougher than most of the boys in the street, now she was acned and overweight, and she knew she could not win it. Rita, a sad adolescent, read about the sixties in Blue Jeans, she saw it happen on Juke Box Jury. The sixties came to Rita softly and secretly at night in her bedroom, yearningly restlessly, on sad strands of Carolina Moon and Don't, ballads of love and moonlight. She listened to Radio Luxemburg under her covers at night, never dreaming that there really was such a place.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Grandfather's Footsteps by Gillian White. Copyright © 1994 Gillian White. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Grandfather's Footsteps: A Novel

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