Elsie and Tom kept themselves apart, as they preferred now. They stayed away from anyone they might row with. Penny was someone they hardly saw at all. This hurt Elsie who, during the spring, had found herself very attached to the girl. But people don’t always turn out the way you expect. When Elsie caught a glimpse of Penny now, across the way or round the shops, Penny seemed self-absorbed and different. Elsie couldn’t imagine having anything to do with her. Penny didn’t even seem to come from the same place.
It was Craig’s absence that hurt Elsie most. For long stretches of the summer months they hardly saw him. His mother feared that, now he was apart from Penny, he’d go off the rails again. She thought he was too suggestible and the signs were not good. The worst thing was when they bumped into him, one night in August, at Nesta’s fire.
Unlike many others round there, Nesta had never held a party. She went to everyone else’s but she never returned the favour. It was no more than anyone expected. This was the woman who went borrowing milk and bread and eggs round the doors and never brought anything back. And it wasn’t as though everyone was dying to get inside her house to see what it was like. Half the women in the street wouldn’t be seen dead inside Nesta’s house.
Chez Dixon things were changing. Something was happening to Nesta. Some would have said it was hormones, some would have said it was genes. Some might have said it was conscience, she’d realised that she was bringing up three little bairns in a home that wasn’t a nice one. Most of the ladies of the Court, however, decided that Nesta was pulling up her bootstraps because of her new bairn, Keanu, born early that summer. By August Nesta was spring-cleaning madly.
With the baby in a papoose she stood in her garden and shouted out instructions to her husband and the two young daughters. And out they came carrying old rubbish: duff furniture, dirty clothes, rubbishy old toys. Everything looked as if it came from a car-boot sale, and most of it probably had. Nesta used to spend Sunday mornings rummaging up and down the rows of cars parked at the equestrian centre, but now that was all over. No more cluttering up their home. She had to learn new habits. And everything with pointed corners and sharp bits had to go, as well: she had a tiny son to protect.
Keanu watched all this from his mother’s back, as she told the rest of her dazed family to build a stack of all their old stuff on the common ground at the back of the Court. A bonfire was inexpertly heaped and humped in the middle of the sun-dried grass. A curiously unsettling, pathetic bonfire, too, being composed of such ordinary things. Dolls’ heads and lampshades stuck out, piles of old books and catalogues, the wound, frayed coils of curtains and used clothes. Word went round that Nesta would torch it all, one particular Monday night after it got dark. She had a certain sense of drama. The rest of the street conferred; they’d be out there to watch. Nesta’s voluntary, purging house-fire was the closest she’d get to throwing a party.
Watching from her top window, Elsie saw Nesta set a torch to the unstable pyramid of her belongings. Elsie was sipping a very strong gin and tonic.
In the room behind her, Tom would glug back his in sharp mouthfuls as he dressed. He was going to some effort to dress tonight, for seeing the neighbours again. Elsie’s heart warmed; she was returning him to the community.
Friday night she had come home with a bottle of gin. When she’d bought it, Judith at the shop had asked once again if she was back on the drink, even with Tom home. Elsie had answered her gruffly. Bringing booze back into the house was her test. She wanted to drink and Tom could lump it. He was dependent on her now and he couldn’t kick up the kind of fuss that he used to. At last she could have her own way. Maybe everything she wanted. In full view of Tom she unpacked the Friday-night shopping on the kitchen benches and there was the bottle of gin. No tonic, no lemon, just the booze. And Tom hadn’t said a word. He’d taken two glasses from the cupboard and they’d settled in for a night of serious drinking. Saturday and Sunday had been the same. Sitting across from each other, trying out only the most companionable of conversations, drinking steadily through bottle after bottle. Her housekeeping money was vanishing.
Maybe Tom was drinking only because it was time to see the neighbours again. Well, whatever it takes to see you through. Elsie had reached that conclusion once again. Life takes a lot of nerve, and whatever can give you nerve is all right.
Tom clung to her arm like an agoraphobe all the way across the street. But when other people bustled around them, when they entered the gathering crowd, he straightened up, let go of her arm, smiled and started to murmur hellos. Elsie was proud.
Here was the fire in full spate.
The street stood back in a ring and held their
