Looking for Mrs Dextrose (36 page)

I heard Dad say, “Mink,” just above a whisper.

That was her.

My mother’s face.
My mother’s face.
Younger than I had expected, certainly plenty younger than Dad. Mid-fifties?

Her gaze alighted just to my right. She had spotted him. Her eyes widened and narrowed in a moment, her lips pursed and she shouted something that I could not hear but which caused those around
her to see where she was looking, while one parent covered her daughter’s ears.

I watched as she pushed aside the few people in front of her and started moving quickly – in the opposite direction from us. Mrs Dextrose was getting away.

I couldn’t let that happen. Whatever she thought of her feckless husband, I was sure she would want to see me.

“MUM!
MUM!
” I began pushing my way through the crowd. This time they pressed themselves aside.

The yellow hat stopped moving.

Once again her head turned, but this time her eyes rested on mine.

That was when I heard it. ‘
Ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting!
’ So much more urgently than the previous time I’d heard that little bell ring.

I read my mother’s lips – “Pilsbury?” – that was what she said – as the tram came into view from behind the buildings on the far side of the road. It caught
her a glancing blow on her shoulder, spinning her round and sending the yellow hat flying into the air. A gasp rose from the crowd. I saw the tram driver’s face, inches from his windscreen as
he stood up and leaned forward, screaming silently, arm still pumping the bell-pull as he drove on past.

‘
Ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting!
’

I lost sight of her when she went down.

People had gathered around, encircling her, like children do at a playground fight. But there was no chanting, only an eerie hush. I broke through them.

One man was placing a rolled up coat under her head; a woman standing above him was speaking urgently on a mobile telephone. Everyone else just watched.

There was so much blood on the road.

I threw myself down beside her prone form. “This is my mother,” I told anyone listening.

This wasn’t how it was meant to happen.

She must have gone down on the back of her head, because her ponytail was engorged with blood, unrecognisable as hair. It looked like a trail of gore. Her blue mackintosh had fallen open. She
wore a tatty old striped V-neck jumper – red, black and blue horizontal stripes – over a lacy white collared shirt. A silver locket hanging from a fine chain rested at the base of the V
of the jumper.

Her eyes were closed.

Beauty and grace, dressed for comfort not for effect.

Was this how I was to remember her?

As I gazed at her face, I felt for her hand and found it. It was small and warm. I closed my fingers around hers and gave them a squeeze. She did not respond.

This is your mother, I told myself.

So how had it come to this?

I studied the lines and contours of her face. Delicate crows’ feet around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Her cheekbones were high and her chin narrow, she had small, pouty lips,
unpainted. Elfin. Her eyebrows were very dark, in contrast to her silvery hair, and she had a small, dark mole above her left eyebrow.

Although I’d tried to picture her recently, many times, I had never arrived at an image I was happy with, which I felt might tally reasonably with the reality. What I had expected was a
careworn woman, tired, with shadows under her eyes. Bitter and abandoned.

I had been wrong.

“Mum?” I whispered. “
Mum?
”

A splatter of blood marred one of her cheeks and I wiped it away. As I was doing so, someone arrived beside me on their knees, put their arms beneath her and lifted her torso off the ground.

Harrison Dextrose.

Her arms and head flopped backwards as he did so.

As he cradled her limp form against his chest, burying his head into the crook of her neck, he kept repeating over and over: “Frankie. Frankie. Frankie. Frankie…”

She looked so fragile there.

Francesca Dextrose’s funeral was so well-attended that the little crematorium outside Dritt-on-Sea had a speaker in the grounds, with seats arranged so that those who
could not fit inside could listen to the service. To do so they had braved a chill northerly wind. I’d been asked whether I wanted to say a few words by the lady in charge, but had
declined.

I mean, what would I have said? Nothing I could think of would have suited the occasion.

Dad spruced himself up and it was quite a transformation. He lived out of a metal trunk at the end of his bed, from which he’d dug out an old suit. Although it was khaki-coloured and
creased in all the wrong places it showed willing, with a nod to his personality. He cut chunks off his beard, slicked down his hair and donned what I imagined was his one and only tie (brown).

Most of those who turned up seemed to know him – once they’d seen past the cleanliness and sobriety – and offered condolences; however, he courted few conversations, preferring
to remain in his seat up front with his head lowered. I left him to his thoughts and hung around on the periphery, wondering what I had lost, secretly, guiltily grateful that I did not know. All I
had was what might have been, a series of ifs and buts, intangibles, as impossible to grasp as a shadowplay in mist.

What if she had been – as her appearance had suggested – a sprightly, effervescent, joyful woman, who grabbed every one of life’s opportunities? Perhaps her husband’s
lengthy absences were a relief to her, rather than the burden I had imagined? Would she have loved her son, had circumstance not dragged him away from her?

And what was that circumstance? Why had they abandoned me?

I had never known my birth mother and now she was in a wooden box. A waxwork, a puppet separated from its puppeteer. A cadaver.

I thought – feared – I might remember her face in death, that immobile expression, captured forever in my mind’s eye. But I didn’t. By the morning after her accident, it
was like a half-completed jigsaw puzzle, and the pieces only disappeared, leaving me with a mere photofit. Mrs Dextrose had left me with more questions than answers, and I could not help but wonder
whether I would be better off trying to forget her, as if I had never chased that yellow hat that awful night.

No one at the funeral asked who I was or why I was there, and Dad can’t have mentioned me to anyone. I doubt he could have coped with the complication. There was no wake,
everyone simply drifted away.

Although I had worried that he would hit the bottle immediately after his wife’s death, he had proven me wrong. Instead, he had spent the four days prior to the funeral sitting on her bed
in their twin room above the Dog & Duck, sifting through her effects, stopping often and staring into space. (I supposed it was inevitable they would have slept in separate beds, although the
circumstances above the pub had left them no choice.)

At night I tucked myself into her bed and he into his own. I don’t think I could have done that had I known her. Her smell lingered on the pillows, a floral aroma I matched to a perfume on
the dressing table. I sprayed a little onto the back of my hand and, having checked that Dad wasn’t looking, dabbed some of the evaporating liquid onto my neck. Immediately afterwards I felt
weird and rushed to the bathroom to wash it off, fighting off nausea. That was the last time I touched her perfume.

It was a very old room, with a wooden floor so solid it made no sound when trodden upon, and beams in the ceiling, all original features. (Robin the landlord told me the Dog
& Duck had been built during the late-16th century, back when Dritt-on-Sea had been a haven for sea-faring folk and their whores.) A two-bar heater plugged into the mains provided the only
heat. We existed with both bars on.

A sewing machine had been left out on her bedside table, which she must have worked at while sitting on her bed, as there was no chair; a pair of trousers she had been mending were folded beside
it. Her bedspread was very colourful and patchwork, and I felt certain she had made it herself.

Her bookshelf was so crammed with books that others had had to be piled in front of it. Historical biographies, of politicians, writers, poets, artists, warmongers, peacemakers, romances and the
classics, plays and plenty of detective fiction, and, I suppose inevitably, explorers – but no copy of
The Lost Incompetent
(though there were a couple of dozen pristine copies stacked
beside Dad’s bed). She seemed to have a thing for Inspector Morse.

What little wall space there was, not obscured by shelving, the dresser or the wardrobe, she had filled with pictures, photographs and postcards. The pictures and photographs were of fishing
vessels, tall ships, lobster pots set at arty angles, salty types with pipes and nets, as if she had taken a keen interest in the local area and its erstwhile industry.

It was the postcards that intrigued me the most – three of them, picturing ‘Sunny Barbados’, ‘Weaving in Lanarkshire’ and ‘Welcome to Basingstoke’
– and I peeled off the Sellotape attaching them to the wall to read the backs when Dad had excused himself one time. Had I been expecting anything from him to her, I was to be disappointed.
Auntie Milly, Cedric and Lilith, respectively, had signed those cards. I wondered who they were, but did not ask.

There was no clock, or timepiece of any description, in the room. That had surprised me.

Only on the afternoon before the funeral, when Dad had left to buy some provisions, did I pluck up the courage to look in the wardrobe and drawers. Despite my misgivings, I had
longed to look through her private things. She was dead, so what harm could it do? Besides, perhaps, to myself? In the end I could not help it; I had to satisfy my curiosity.

The large drawers at the bottom of the wardrobe were a disappointment: just some sheets, blankets and bulky woollens. I flicked through the clothing hanging up: a modest collection. It was all
functional wear, suited to days out rambling or chilly evenings in the open, bar one slinky, sequined dress tucked right at the back. I tried to imagine her in it, but failed. Likewise, the
footwear on the shelf below: two pairs of clumpy shoes, one pair of wellies, and a delicate pair of patent leather strapless high-heels with golden buckles. When had she last been treated to a
night out, I wondered?

The four small drawers in the dressing table contained underwear – I opened and closed that one quickly – skirts and shirts, a plastic carton containing make-up and a cheap velvet
box of jewellery. The make-up collection was small but the items were well-used. Two lipsticks, a box of eyeshadows (beige tones), tube of foundation, some blusher and an eyebrow pencil. I opened
one of the lipsticks, a shade of pink, and saw the indentation her lip had worn into its edge.

It didn’t require an expert to know that there was nothing worth stealing from the jewellery box. Beads and brooches, a couple of silver rings, a silver locket, oval-shaped… I
realised – at least, I was fairly certain – it was the one that had been hanging around her neck. Should I open it? I sat staring at it for many minutes, until I became convinced that
Dad would return any moment and that he would not like what he saw.

Then I prised it open quickly, fingers fumbling. It was him: a tiny head-shot crudely cut from a larger photograph, black-and-white, taken at a time when his hair was still in check. He was
smiling. It was such a relief, I nearly cried out loud with happiness.

I could never have defended his dereliction of her – the tawdry bits of which I was aware – but I had to know that she still cared, despite him. Because I was certain, however much
he huffed and bluffed, that she meant plenty to him.

Contented on that front, one gaping hole in our family saga remained, which I had tiptoed and pussyfooted around – buried, frankly – and which I could not let lie any longer. So when
Dad returned to our room clutching shopping I blurted it out. “Dad. Why was I adopted?”

He dropped the bag and stiffened. A melon rolled out across the floorboards, its ridges playing out an uneven beat.

Seconds passed.

“Sit yerself down,” he said.

“Us had no money,” he began. “Simple as that, son. Had no roof over us heads. Had no food for us mouths.”

“Why not?”

Sitting opposite me on the edge of his bed, he looked down at his feet. “That’d be the rub,” he said.

“Well?” I wasn’t going to let him squirm his way out of it this time.

“If yer must know, I’d bought Dextrose I, just a week ’fore yer mother tells us, ‘I’s preggers’. Were bad timing.”

Dextrose was his yacht. He’d used it on several of his expeditions. “You mean you’d spent all your money on a yacht?”

“That’s about it.”

“So you were broke when I came along?”

“Mm.” He had the grace to look uncomfortable.

I just didn’t get it. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why buy a yacht when you obviously couldn’t afford it?”

His face flushed a little. “Harrison Dextrose is an explorer, son – that’s what he does. I were going to make us money. I had plans for that boat.”

“Which were?”

“Single-handed around the world. That’s what I were going to do! Make history, coin in the cash!”

I trawled my trivia knowledge. “Didn’t Francis Chichester make history by sailing single-handed around the world?”

“Hmm,” he went. “Can’t say I’d heard of the minker, till someone mentioned his name.”

“Alright. You said you had
plans
for the boat – what else?”

“Remember, Pilsbury, this were the mid-Sixties – men was heading into space. It were a time of great exploration. No barriers, no boundaries.”

“So what else?”

“Find the North West Passage sea route?”

“Wasn’t that discovered in the 1900s?”

He smiled weakly and nodded. “Someone else pointed that out, just ’fore us set off. Lucky they did! Minking cold up there!”

I didn’t laugh. “What a mess.”

“Sorry, son.”