Human Croquet Read Free Page A

the house for himself but Leonard Fairfax offered him such a good price that he couldn’t bring himself to refuse. And so the Fairfax family returned, unwittingly, to its ancestral abode.

    Charlotte Fairfax had given birth (difficult though it was to imagine this) to two more children after Madge, in order – Vinny (Lavinia) and Gordon (‘my baby!’). Gordon was much younger, an afterthought (‘my surprise!’). When they moved into Arden, Madge had already left to marry an adulterous bank clerk and moved to Mirfield and Vinny was a grown woman of twenty, but Gordon was still a little boy. Gordon had introduced Charlotte to a new emotion. At night she would creep into his new little room under the eaves and gaze at his sleeping face in the soft halo of the nightlight and surprise herself with the overwhelming love she felt for him.
    But time has already begun to fly, soon Eliza will come and ruin everything. Eliza will be my mother. I am Isobel Fairfax, I am the alpha and omega of narrators (I am omniscient) and I know the beginning and the end. The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories. This is one of mine.

PRESENT

SOMETHING WEIRD
    Is-o-bel. A peal of bells. Isabella Tarantella – a mad dance. I am mad, therefore I am. Mad. Am I? Belle, Bella, Best, never let it rest. Bella Belle, doubly foreign for beautiful, but I’m not foreign. Am I beautiful? No, apparently not.
    My human geography is extraordinary. I’m as large as England. My hands are as big as the Lakes, my belly the size of Dartmoor and my breasts rise up like the Peaks. My spine is the Pennines, my mouth the Mallyan Spout. My hair flows into the Humber estuary and causes it to flood and my nose is a white cliff at Dover. I’m a big girl, in other words.
    There’s a strange feeling on the streets of trees, although what it is exactly I wouldn’t like to say. I’m lying in my bed staring up at my attic window which is full of nothing but early morning sky, a blank blue page, an uncharted day waiting to be filled. It’s the first day of April and it’s my birthday, my sixteenth – the mythic one, the legendary one. The traditional age for spindles to start pricking and suitors to come calling and a host of other symbolic sexual imagery to suddenly manifest itself, but I haven’t even been kissed by a man yet, not unless you count my father, Gordon, who leaves his sad, paternal kisses on my cheek like unsettling little insects.
    My birthday has been heralded by something weird – a kind of odoriferous spirit (dumb and invisible) that’s attached itself to me like an aromatic shadow. At first I mistook it for nothing more than the scent of wet hawthorn. On its own this is a sad enough perfume, but the hawthorn has brought with it a strange musty smell that isn’t confined to Hawthorn Close but follows me everywhere I go. It walks down the street with me and accompanies me into other people’s houses (and then leaves again with me, there’s no shaking it off). It floats along the school corridors with me and sits next to me on buses – and the seat remains empty no matter how crowded the bus gets.
    It’s the fragrance of last year’s apples and the smell of the insides of very old books with a base note of dead, wet rose-petals. It’s the distillation of loneliness, an incredibly sad smell, the essence of sorrowfulness and stoppered-up sighs. If it were a commercial perfume it would never sell. Imagine people being offered testers at brightly lit perfume counters, ‘Have you tried Melancholy, madam?’ and then spending the rest of the day with the uncomfortable feeling that someone has placed a cold pebble of misery in their stomachs.
    ‘There, next to my left shoulder,’ I tell Audrey (my friend), and Audrey breathes deeply, and says, ‘No.’
    ‘Nothing?’
    ‘Nothing,’ Audrey (also my next-door neighbour) shakes her head. Charles (my brother) makes a ridiculous snout and snuffs like a