Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
“How can you say that?”
Because Jean’d run out of pills. She’d told him as much. She hadn’t wanted…And he was the one—not Jean—who said she’d not get pregnant the very first time they did it once she’d stopped taking the pills. It’ll be okay, he’d told her. But it wasn’t. And now…He lifted his hands and dropped them, those skilful hands that held the bat that hit the ball, those very same hands that held the pen that wrote the wonderful essays, those hands whose one blow cracked through a brick as he calmly talked about a definition of self.
“Ken.” Mother tried to stay calm, which wasn’t easy considering all that appeared to be riding on this one conversation. “Listen to me, dear. You’ve got a future ahead of you. You’ve got your education. A career.”
Not any longer, he said.
“Yes! It’s still there. And you mustn’t even think about throwing it away for a cheap bit of stuff who wouldn’t recognise your potential if she had it explained to her point by point.”
Jean was more than that, he said. She was all right, he said. They’d known each other for next to forever. He’d see to it they muddled through somehow. He was so sorry. He’d let everyone down. Especially Mrs. Whitelaw, who’d been so good to him.
It was clear he meant the conversation to be over. Mother played her trump card carefully. “Well, you must do as you see fit, but…I don’t wish to hurt you. Still, it must be said. Please think about whether you can be sure it’s your baby in the first place, Ken.” He looked stricken enough for Mother to continue. She said, “You don’t know everything, my dear. You can’t know everything. And you especially can’t know what goes on here when you’re in West Sussex, can you?” She gathered up her belongings and placed them gently into her brief case. “Sometimes, dear Ken, a young girl who sleeps with one boy is only too willing…You know what I mean.”
What she wanted to say was, “That nasty little tart’s been sleeping around for years. God only knows who put her in the club. It could have been anyone. It could have been everyone.”
He said in a low voice that of course it was his baby. Jeannie didn’t sleep around and she didn’t lie.
“Perhaps you’ve just never caught her,” Mother said. “Doing either.” She went on in the kindest possible voice, “You’ve gone off to school. You’ve risen beyond her. It’s understandable that she’d want to bring you back somehow. One can’t malign her for doing that.” And she ended with, “Just think things through, Ken. Don’t do anything hasty. Promise me that. Promise me you’ll wait at least another week before doing anything or telling anyone about the situation.”
Along with a blow-by-blow description of her encounter with Kenneth, we heard Mother’s thoughts on this new Fall of Man over dinner the very night he came to see her. Dad’s response was, “Oh dear. How dreadful for everyone.” My response was a smirk. “End of the reign of another tin god,” I remarked to the ceiling. Mother shot me a look and said we would see who was tin and who was not.
She went to see Jean the very next Monday, taking a day off from school in order to do it. She didn’t want to see her at home, and she wanted the advantage of surprise. So she went to the old Billingsgate Market where Jean was working in some sort of caff.
Mother was fully confident of how her meeting with Jean Cooper would play itself out. She had had many such meetings with unwed mothers-to-be before, and her track record of orchestrating those encounters to a successful conclusion was a stellar one. Most of the girls who had fallen within Mother’s purview had seen reason in the end. Mother was expert in the art of gentle persuasion, her focus always fixed on the baby’s future, the mother’s future, and a delicate division between the two. There was no reason to think she would have any difficulty with Jean Cooper, who was her mental, emotional, and social inferior.
She found Jean not in the caff but in the Ladies’ where she was having a break, smoking a cigarette and flicking its ash into the basin. She wore a white smock brindled with grease spots. She’d haphazardly bunched her hair beneath a cap. A ladder in her stockings shot up her right leg from inside her shoe. If comparative appearances were anything to go by, Mother had the upper hand from the first.
Jean hadn’t been one of her pupils. Streaming was very much the vogue at that time, and Jean had spent her years at the comprehensive swimming among the lesser fish. But Mother knew who she was. One couldn’t know Kenneth Fleming without knowing who Jean Cooper was. And Jean knew who Mother was as well. No doubt she’d heard enough from Kenneth about his teacher to have had her fill of Mrs. Whitelaw long before their encounter at Billingsgate Market.
“Kenny looked dead grey in the face when I saw him Friday evening,” was the first thing Jean said. “He wouldn’t talk. He went back to school on Saturday instead of Sunday night. I expect you had a hand in that, didn’t you?”
Mother began with her standard line. “I’d like to have a chat about the future.”
“Whose future? Mine? The baby’s? Or Kenny’s?”
“All three of your futures.”
Jean nodded. “I bet you’ve got yourself in a real dither about my future, haven’t you, Mrs. Whitelaw? I bet you’re losing sleep about my future. I bet you’ve got my future all mapped out for me and all’s I have to do is listen while you tell me how things’ll be.” She dropped her cigarette to the cracked linoleum floor, crushed it out with her toe, and immediately lit another.
“Jean, that’s not good for the baby,” Mother said.
“I’ll decide what’s good for the baby, thank you very much. Me and Kenny’ll decide. On our own.”
“Is either of you in a position to decide? On your own, that is.”
“We know what we know.”
“Ken’s a student, Jean. He has no work experience. If he leaves school now, you’ll be caught up in a life with neither future nor promise. You must see that.”
“I see lots. I see that I love him and he loves me and we want a life together and we mean to have it.”
“You mean to have it,” Mother said. “You. Jean. Ken isn’t a part of the wanting. No boy has that sort of wanting in him when he’s sixteen years old. And Ken’s just turned seventeen. He’s little more than a child. And you yourself are…Jean, do you want to take such a step as this—marriage and a baby, one right after the other—when you’re so young? When you’ve so few resources? When you’ll have to rely upon your families for assistance and your families are merely scraping by as it is? Is that what you think is best for the three of you? For Ken, for the child, for yourself?”
“I see lots,” Jeannie said. “I see that we been together for years and what we have is good and it’s always been good and him going to some posh school isn’t going to change that not one bit. No matter what you want.”
“I want nothing but what’s best for both of you.”
Jean snorted and attended to her cigarette, all the time watching Mother through the smoke. “I see lots,” she repeated. “I see you talked to Kenny and twisted him round and got him upset.”
“He was already upset. Heavens, you must know that he wouldn’t exactly greet this news”—with a gesture at Jean’s stomach—“with joy. It’s made a muddle of his life.”
“I see you made him look at me with his eyes gone doubtful. I see the questions you had him ask. I see him thinking, What if Jeannie’s dishing it out for three or four other blokes as well as for me, and I see where he got the idea in the first place because she’s standing right in front of me bigger’n life.”
Jean tossed her cigarette to the floor and ground it out beside the other. “I got to get back to work. If you excuse me,” and she ducked her head and wiped at her cheeks as she passed my mother.
Mother said, “You’re upset. That’s understandable. But Ken’s questions are legitimate. If you’re going to ask him to throw away his future, then you’ve got to accept the fact that he might want first to be assured that—”
She swung back so quickly that Mother faltered. “I??
“But there are other options,” Mother said. “You needn’t have the baby in the first place. Even if you do, you needn’t keep it. There are thousands of men and women eager to adopt, longing for a child. There’s no reason to bring an unwanted child into the world.”
Jeannie grasped Mother’s arm so hard that later—at dinner that night when she showed them to us—bruises rose in the spots where her fingers dug in. “Don’t you call it unwanted, you nasty-minded slag. Don’t you bloody dare.”
That’s when she saw the real Jean Cooper, Mother reported to us in a wavering voice. A girl who’d do anything to get what she wanted. A girl capable of any act, even violence. And she meant to be violent, there was no doubt of that. She meant to strike Mother and she would have done if one of the market secretaries hadn’t come in at that moment, teetering on high heels and catching herself on a rip in the lino. She said, “Damn! Oh, sorry. Am I interrupting?” Jean said, “No,” flung Mother’s arm to one side, and left.
Mother followed. “It won’t work. The two of you. Jean, don’t do this to him. Or at the very least wait until—”
“—you’ve had an even chance to get him for yourself?” Jean finished.
Mother stopped a few feet away, safely choosing a distance from which Jean couldn’t reach her. “Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t be absurd.”
But she was neither, was Jean Cooper. She was sixteen years old and a seer of the future, although she couldn’t have known it at the time. At the time, she must have thought only, I’ve won, because Kenneth did leave school at the end of the term. They didn’t marry at once. Rather, they surprised everyone by waiting, working, squirrelling away their money, and finally marrying six months after their first son Jimmy was born.
After that, we ate our meals in peace in Kensington. We heard nothing more of Kenneth Fleming. I don’t know how Dad felt about the sudden absence of dining conversation, but I myself spent many a happy hour celebrating the fact that the god-boy of the Isle of Dogs had turned out to be yet another mortal with feet of clay. As for her part, Mother didn’t abandon Kenneth entirely. That wasn’t her style. Instead, she persuaded Dad to make a place for him in the printworks so he’d have a steady job and be able to take care of his family. But Kenneth Fleming was no longer the sterling example of youth’s promise fulfilled as she’d obviously once hoped he might be. And thus there was no reason for her to nightly trot out him and his triumphant escapades for our admiration.
Mother washed her hands of Kenneth Fleming in much the same way as she washed her hands of me some three years later. The only difference was that when the opportunity arose not long after my father’s death, she picked up a towel and dried them.
Kenneth was twenty-six at the time. Mother was sixty.
CHAPTER
5
“Kenneth Fleming,” the ITN news correspondent finished, speaking into his microphone with a solemnity that he seemed to feel appropriate for the occasion, “dead at thirty-two. The world of cricket has much to mourn this night.” The camera panned over his shoulder to the swag-topped walls and ornate wrought iron of the Grace Gate at Lord’s Cricket Ground, which served as backdrop to his report. “We’ll have reactions in a moment from his fellow team members, and from Guy Mollison, England’s captain.”
Jeannie Cooper left her position at the sitting room window. She stabbed her finger into the television’s off button. She watched the screen dissolve from image to black, going fuzzy on the edges first. It seemed to leave a residue behind.
She thought, Got to get a new telly, wonder how much new televisions cost.
It was a convenient area to send her thoughts scurrying: what kind of telly she would buy; how big a screen it would have; did she want stereo speakers and a VCR to go with it; did she want one in a cabinet like she had now, a hulking monster as big as a fridge and as old as Jimmy.
As her son’s name fluttered unbidden in her mind, Jeannie bit down hard on the inside of her lip. She tried to draw blood. A cut lip, she decided, was a pain she could manage. Wondering where Jimmy had taken himself off to all this long day was decidedly not.
“Jimmy never came home?” she’d asked her brother when the police returned her from the horror of Kent.
“Didn’t go to school neither, from what Shar told me. He’s done a proper bunk this time.” Derrick snagged two of his weight-training devices from the coffee table. These looked like pincers, and he squeezed them alternately in each hand, muttering, “Adductor, flexor, pronator, yeah.”
“You didn’t look for him, Der? You didn’t go to the park?”
Derrick watched his massive arm muscles contract and relax. “Tell you one thing about that little sod, Pook. Wherever he is ain’t likely to be the park.”
She and her brother had had that conversation at half past six, just before his departure. It was after ten now. Her two younger children had been in bed for more than an hour. And ever since closing each of their doors and descending the stairs, Jeannie had stood at the window, listening to the drone of the television voices, and watching the night for a sign of Jimmy.
She went to the coffee table for her cigarettes and dug in her pocket for the box of matches. She was still dressed for work in the smock and crêpe-soled shoes she’d put on at half past three that morning. They were beginning to feel as if they’d melded on to her, like a second skin. The only article of clothing she’d removed all day was her cap, and this she’d left near the till in Crissys before leaving for Kent. That had been in another life, it seemed, the part she would henceforth label Before the Police Came to Billingsgate.
Jeannie drew in on her cigarette. She went from the coffee table back to the front window and tipped the curtain away from the glass.
She saw movement on the pavement three doors down. She hoped against reason and experience that the figure heading in her direction was her oldest child. The figure was tall and spare, she decided, he walked with the same energy, he was lean like his dad…She allowed herself a moment to feel the spring-release of tension that comes with relief. Then she saw it wasn’t Jimmy at all, but Mr. Newton taking his corgi for her nightly stroll to Crossharbour Station and back.
Jeannie thought about setting out on a search for Jimmy. She rejected the idea. There were things she had to discover from her son, and the only way to ferret them out was to stay where she was, in this room, so that she could be the first member of the family that Jimmy saw when he finally walked in. Until that happened, she told herself, she had to be calm. She had to wait. She had to pray.
Except that she knew she couldn’t pray to change what had already happened.
From the ten o’clock news she had gathered the details she’d not asked for earlier: when Kenny had died, the unofficial cause of his death pending formal autopsy, where his body had been found, the fact that he was alone. “The police have verified at this time that the cottage fire was started by a cigarette smouldering in an armchair,” the news reader had said. He’d looked at the camera and his regretful shake of the head had said the rest: “Ladies and gentlemen, mind my words. Cigarettes do kill in more ways than one.”
Jeannie left the window to stub hers out in a metal ashtray shaped like a clam shell and stamped with the gold words Weston-Super-Mare. She lit another, picked up the ashtray, returned to her post.
She would have liked to argue that the bike was the problem, that all her troubles with Jimmy had started the very day he brought the bloody motorbike home. But the truth was more complicated than a series of arguments between mother and son over ownership of a means of transportation. The truth lay in everything they had avoided for years as a subject of conversation.
She let the curtain fall back into place over the window. She straightened it neatly along the ledge. She wondered how much of her life
She moved across the sitting room to the old grey couch, part of the dismal three-piece suite she and Kenny had inherited from her parents upon their marriage. She picked up a tattered copy of Woman’s Own and perched on the edge of one of the cushions. It was so worn that its stuffing had long ago been packed into tight little pellets. They afforded all the comfort of having a sit on a patch of wet sand. Kenny had wanted to replace the old furniture with something grand when he first started to play for England. But he’d been already two years gone from their lives when he made the offer, and Jeannie’d refused him.
She opened Woman’s Own on her knees. She bent over the pages. She tried to read. She began “The Diary of a Wedding Dress,” but after four tries at the same paragraph recounting the remarkable adventures of a wedding dress for hire, she tossed the magazine back on the coffee table, brought her fists to her forehead, squeezed her eyes shut, and tried to pray.
“God,” she whispered. “God, if you’ll please…” What, she asked herself. What should God do? Alter reality? Change the facts?
Against her will she saw him again: stretched out motionless in that cool room of closed cupboards and stainless steel, flushed to the colour of salmon’s roe, still as marble where once he’d been filled with restless energy and breath and flight….
Quickly, she pushed herself off the couch and began to pace the width of the room. She beat the knuckles of her right hand hard into the palm of her left. Where is he, where is he, where is he, she thought.
The sound of the motorbike stopped her. It sputtered down the walk that separated the houses on Cardale Street from those behind them. It idled long at the back garden’s gate, as if its rider were trying to decide what to do. Then the gate creaked as it opened and shut, the rumble of an engine came closer, and the motorbike belched once and died just on the other side of the kitchen door.
Jeannie went back to the couch and sat. She heard the kitchen door swing open then shut. Footsteps crossed the lino and there he was, metal-tipped Doc Martens loosely laced, beltless blue jeans hanging round hips, grimy T-shirt spotted with holes at the neck. He used his hand to shove his long hair behind one ear, and he shifted his weight to one foot so that a skinny hip jutted out.