Maggie Gee - The White Family

I shall go with him, if Alfred goes.

That thought brought May a queer kind of comfort. The new things were probably not meant for them. It would be too much, too fast, too loud.

Probably it’s rich people live long lives.

Shirley was halfway down the corridor, a glaze of smile still fixing her features, before she remembered to stop trying to please.

I hate my family. Ignorant bigots. Mum thinks she’s broad-minded, but she’s bad as him, she almost fainted when she thought she saw Elroy.

Why do I have to put up with their nonsense? I’m thirty-seven years old, I’ve been married and widowed — They’ve never been anywhere. They don’t know anything. All Mum knows she gets from books. She’s only been with one man all her life. She can’t see what a — pig Dad is, she dotes on him, he’s the world to her.

Ignorant. Pig ignorant. That’s what I say to Elroy; take no notice.

The truth was, Elroy got less angry than she did. Or showed less anger, which wasn’t the same thing. Sometimes she thought he bottled up his feelings because it was so humiliating, admitting other people thought you were dirt. Better to say nothing, to ignore the pain. And he had low expectations, of course. To him, that was just the way white people were.

Kojo, older, richer, more confident, had found them comic, and slightly pathetic. ‘It’s because they have no education,’ he said. ‘They’re afraid of us because they know nothing about us. I’ll ask them out to Ghana as my guests, and then they will see another world.’ ‘I can’t imagine it, though.’ And of course it never happened.

The two men coped in their different ways, while Shirley was left mortified, speechless, furious. She sometimes wanted to kill her parents. Because they were hers. In case she was like them. To prove all white people weren’t the same.

But Shirley’s anger was playing itself out as she walked down the echoing yellow stairs. The lift had been broken for the last two weeks … Peeling paint, a smell of damp. She would have liked to get going on this hospital. Shirley had always been good at mending, painting, polishing, making good. I need a job, she thought, as so often. I could do something. I’ve got lots to offer.

But Elroy preferred her not to work, and Kojo had expected her to be a mother, as she had expected to be a mother.

She wasn’t a mother. She would never be a mother. Unless there was a miracle. Very soon.

Maybe mothering Dirk when he was little is the nearest I’ll ever get to it .

Just then she saw him, one flight down, that completely unmistakable pale stubble which filled her, at that moment, with fear and loathing, for Dirk was even worse than her dad.

But he caught it from Dad. Ranting on about ‘the coloureds’.

I can’t see him. I can’t bear it .

She walked silently down the ward that opened to her right, and skulked by some curtains till his boots had gone by, clicking fast upstairs.

‘I wonder if Dirk will ever leave home?’

They held hands again, now Shirley was gone, and with her any tension between them. It was always the kids who made trouble; together they were comfortable.

‘He’s not very old,’ observed Alfred, judiciously. Which seemed to prove he himself wasn’t old.

‘Twenty-five is quite old enough to leave home,’ said May, mildly. ‘He could get a little room. We don’t want to baby him.’

‘What he gets from George wouldn’t pay for much.’ Dirk had a ‘little job’ at the local newsagent, fixed up as a favour by Alfred’s oldest friend. ‘He can’t leave home till he gets a real job. I mean, it was different in our day. I’d been working ten years already, at his age. But that’s not his fault. Is it?’

‘He still goes for interviews, you know. Even if he doesn’t tell us any more. I find the papers from the Job Centre. Do you think he’d have more chance if his hair was different?’

Alfred had never thought about Dirk’s hair. It was Darren who’d been trouble in that department, growing it long, looking namby-pamby. ‘Are you saying it’s old-fashioned?’ he asked, doubtfully. ‘I suppose he looks a bit like a GI —’

‘Skinhead,’ May corrected him briefly. ‘They look like Nazis, but I suppose they’re not … It is in fashion, with some people.’

‘On the other hand, it’s clean, it’s tidy. He’s quite a good boy, in some ways. He’s good company for his old dad.’

‘You mean, he goes down the pub with you.’

‘Why are you being so hard on the boy? It’s not like you. My duck, my darling.’ He squeezed her hand, gentle, affectionate.

She knew Alfred was trying to tell her he loved her, and also asking her to spare him home truths, but she had to get it off her chest. ‘He gets on my nerves, with you not there.’

‘Maybe he could go and live with his sister.’

‘The last place he could go is Shirley’s.’

‘In my day family looked out for each other. Do you think they’ll look out for him, after we’re gone? Darren hardly knows Dirk, does he?’

‘They’ll get to know each other while Darren’s here.’ May tried her best to sound confident. Would Darren like Dirk, if he got to know him? Her youngest son was hard to like. And he wasn’t bright like Darren was. He wasn’t interested in anything except computers. Well, and his peculiar new friends.

‘I’m so glad Darren is coming home,’ said Alfred, and a real smile, a smile of tenderness, lit up his face, making it seem less bony, younger, and she thought, he’ll live, and things will go right, Alfred will get better, we’ll all love each other … Alfred will never be angry again .

And Alfred Tennyson was ready, as always:

Beat, happy stars, timing with things below,

Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell,

Blest, but for some dark undercurrent woe

That seems to draw — but it shall not be so:

Let all be well, be well.

They sat in silence for a while, contented, as the life of the ward washed round them. Draggles of people spilled out from the bedheads and blocked the central channel down the ward, until nurses came, smiling but firm, and shepherded the overflow away. ‘It’s really only supposed to be two visitors per patient —’

One Asian family arrived in strength; around twenty people, from pensioners to babies. The old and the young both wore brilliant colours, the grandmother’s white head wrapped in a marigold-orange headscarf, the little girls in frilly western party frocks, the middle-aged conventionally smart, men in pin-striped suits, women in chic tailored dresses.

‘Lovely family,’ May whispered to herself, quieting the tiny voice that said, they’re doing very well for themselves .

‘Too many of ’em,’ said Alfred.

She didn’t have to listen to what he said. It was just his noise, the stutter of an engine far away across the bay. ‘Lovely family,’ she repeated, contented. Families ought to be like that, all coming round when there was trouble.

She wished the boys were here tonight. In fact, they had hardly been boys together, for Darren was fifteen years older than Dirk … Dirk had always needed looking after. Darren was successful, Dirk was not.

Though Alfred wasn’t the gentlest of men she knew he felt sorry for their youngest son. And in his way, he’d been a very good father (but had he? she wondered, suddenly unsure). He’d tried to teach Dirk football, rugger, cricket — Dirk was useless at all of them. He’d tried to teach Dirk right from wrong. He was a man of principle. A man with backbone. Sometimes he talked too much about backbone, and he never thought Dirk had much of it.