TT 4 - The Bridings

“No! No! Not here!”
The voice, high and donnish, is strung to breaking point across its sharply enunciated consonants.
Elizabeth Dryden looks up from her newspaper. What small, embarrassing fracas has her brother-in-law embroiled himself in now? She goes to the window and slides up the sash sending a rather dirty looking pigeon fluttering into the air. Eric Briding, his face turned upward like a dish, stands below her on the quay. “I don’t bloody care. Take it down!”
She hears the creak of a metal ladder and spots to her right a young man in a dark green polo shirt descending the rungs rhythmically, the bunting that swoops gently into his hand from the gable of the sailing club dropping into an ever more dejected angle.
“It’s a bloody joke!” Eric says, indignation coursing through his white, sinewy body so that he seems to flutter like the coloured pennants that now decorate the eastern end of the quayside.
“Sorry mate - I was told it would be OK.”
“Well, it’s not bloody ‘Oh Kay’! This is a private residence and I should have been asked!”
The council worker apologises with an unconcerned shrug, picks up his ladder and moves away, leaving Eric with a surfeit of righteous irascibility.

Elizabeth pads downstairs and out into the small front garden where she finds Professor Briding in the Hollyhocks, his body alert with suspicion as he watches the men re-route the bunting.”
“I’m just making some tea, Eric.” She says, hoping to lure him back inside the house.
“It’s a joke!” Eric says again, then, predictably “Where’s Eleanor?”
“She’s in the bath” Elizabeth says, and adds pointedly ‘Chilling out.’
‘Chilling? Out?’ Eric repeats, as though nonplussed by the phrase.
‘Relaxing, Eric.’
He holds her eye for a moment. ‘I see.’ He bustles past her into the house. Elizabeth hears his Birkenstocks slap officiously across the tiled floor of the hallway and then up the stairs towards the bathroom.

She wanders out onto the quay with her mug of tea and looks back with pleasure at the jumble of elegant fan-lights, bay windows and little wooden balconies. The other houses are painted Suffolk pink or cream or white, only Anchor House is black: its sobriety emphasised now by the bunting that terminates on the weathervane of the house to the left, and takes off again from the house to the right. She doesn’t understand Eric’s objections to the bunting. Wasn’t it Tendringhoe’s old fashioned gaiety and sense of community that made him buy a house right in the middle of the picturesque waterfront in the first place? Perhaps it was the sloppy confidence of the young man from the council that brought out the wire-haired terrier in Eric. Still, such calamitous affronts to his manhood didn’t tend to lay him low for long, and a couple of soothing hours guiding his wife around by the shoulders or organising his children into some obligatory project would soon have him back in his usual high spirits.

Elizabeth sits on the edge of the quay and swings her legs over the edge where they dangle a couple of feet above the estuary mud. The cloud is moving rapidly inland, drawing ever larger patches of clear, deep blue sky behind it. She leans back on her hands, closes her eyes, and feels the fresh sea breeze on her Londoner’s skin. She loves coming to her sister’s house. It reminds her of the holiday houses they stayed in as children: high ceilings, sloping floor-boards and unpredictable stair treads. She even loves hanging her clothes in the huge, dark wardrobe, listening to its brass handles rattling against the doors and the coat hangers tingling efficiently inside. She imagines that it communes silently with all the holiday wardrobes of her childhood; a sonorous cupboard song of keyless keyholes and teak veneers and a single forgotten marble rolling from a corner.

Elizabeth watches the rust-red sail of a smack gliding down the estuary. She thinks that perhaps today she will take Basil and Rabbit to the beach to look for sea-anenomes in the rock pools; and dig with them beneath the little worms of wet sand for crabs. Rabbit will want to make her specimens perform, or at the very least, die interestingly. Basil will want to classify them. Dear, strange, earnest Basil. Elizabeth pulls her knees up under her chin. The illicit bunting strims frantically behind her in the breeze, but behind the salt-blown freshness she can already feel the warmth of the morning sun as it burns through the thinning cloud. She inhales the fresh but slightly dirty mineral smell of the estuary.

‘Aunty Lizzy!’ She turns to see her nephew coming across the quay towards her. He is clutching a bucket in one hand and dragging a long, wooden-handled spade in the other. He has a huge pair of bird-watching binoculars around his neck. She holds out her arms and Basil trots towards her and hugs her clumsily, still clutching his bucket and almost taking her eye out with the corner of his metal spade.
‘Hello sweet boy’ she kisses his thick brown curls.
‘Have you seen any guillemots, Aunty?’ Basil’s eyes are round and brown and grave.
‘I’m not sure, darling. I’m not very good on sea birds.’ She hugs him to her. He is small for his age, like a little frog still, his skinny legs terminating in soft, splaying brown sandals. She wants to fold him up and squeeze him to her. “You were in bed when I arrived last night.’ She kisses him again.
‘What time did you get here?’ He asks.
‘Oh, it was gone midnight’
He gazes at her, his mouth slightly open. Is he reassessing her in light of this exciting piece of information or is he too old at ten to be impressed by the witching hour?
‘Did you take the A12?’
She tries not to smile. “Yes, I did.”
‘The road works are a real nuisance.’
‘They certainly are, darling. Now, tell me about Guillemots.’
‘I’ve been reading about them in Birds of the British Isles by G de Witt Talmage.’

Basil’s prodigious and somewhat indiscriminate appetite for the printed word is well served by the library at Anchor House. The main stock comes from the several trunks of exquisitely illustrated books on natural science left to Eric by his grandfather whose amateur passion for the subject has come good in his grandson, now an eminent Professor of Biology. Eric's mother, feeling she should add to the collection for future generations, searched around in second-hand book shops for any decently bound volume with pretty patterning on the spine. Thus Basil has at his disposal a vast array of quite wonderfully portentous looking tomes, albeit of variable quality in terms of content, and sitting cross-legged in some quiet and forgotten corner of the house can lose himself for entire blissful afternoons in such anachronistic treats as The British Fleet, by Commander Chas. N. Robinson, R.N, The Social Life of Insects by J.H. Farbre, or Enquire Within; The book that every household needs.

Basil lifts the binoculars to his eyes and gazes patiently through them, rotating his whole upper body slowly from side to side in order to scan the horizon. Elizabeth wants to ask him how he is getting on at school, but she remembers the anxiety or, at best, plain indifference that this question induced in her when she was a child. School was just school, you went and you got on with it, and sometimes it was fun, sometimes it was OK, sometimes you got bullied. Elizabeth suspects that Basil, a bright, eccentric child, is a bit of an outsider. She wants to tell him that he is beautiful and clever and extraordinary and that his time will come. Instead she says ‘What do you see?’
‘I see…’but whatever it is he sees she will never know. Eleanor is calling them from the house.
‘Ba-sil, Lizzy. Breakfast.’ Elizabeth turns and sees her sister framed in the front doorway, natural and sweetly competent in cropped linen trousers and a loose white shirt, her plait of auburn hair over one shoulder.
‘Come on then, Basilica, let’s go and eat.’ she says, picking up his bucket and spade and allowing him to walk backwards at her side so that he can continue staring across the estuary through the huge binoculars for as long as possible.

Eric is cheerfully frying bacon in a huge, black skillet, a tea-towel tucked into the waist-band of his trousers. ‘Come and look at this, Liz.’ He knows there was a moment of tetchiness between them earlier and he wants them to be friends again.
Elizabeth looks over his shoulder into the pan of sizzling bacon. ‘I love that smell.’ she says.
‘Look at that lovely fat coming out, no water, like the rubbish you get at the supermarket.’
‘Is it suffolk bacon?’
‘Of course. Ah, look at that crispy rind. Now that’s real food!’
This is Eric at his best. Providing. Making rituals from small things.

‘Butter some bread for us, would you Lizzy.’ Eleanor is spreading a blue check cloth over the ugly formica top of the kitchen table. Basil sits on one of the chairs scanning a row of cans on the high shelf above the cooker with his binoculars.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Basil, put those away now please’ Eleanor says.
‘Properly. In their case.’ Eric calls after him, as he disappears into the library.
‘Bacon ready!’ Eric calls, as though in a professional kitchen.
Elizabeth hands him the bread she’s already buttered and he begins making a pile of butties. Eleanor pours three mugs of tea and two glasses of milk and puts them on the table. ‘Rabbit, Basil’ she calls, ‘sit up now please.’
‘Where is Rabbit?’ Elizabeth asks.
‘In bed, reading’ Basil has come into the kitchen.
‘Go and get her up would you Bazzy.’ Eleanor asks, and adds quickly ‘Nicely.’

But before Basil can slide back off his chair, Rabbit, as Rachael Briding has been called since she was a toddler, shuffles in barefoot and still in her pyjamas. ‘Hello Aunty’ she gives Elizabeth a kiss but it is quick and self-conscious. She is nearly thirteen. She slumps onto a chair and puts her open book face down on the table.
‘Not on the breakfast table, please.’ Eric says.
‘Why is it that you can have the newspaper but I can’t have my book?’
Elizabeth thinks this is a fair question.
‘Because I say so.’
Rabbit sighs and pushes her book onto the dresser behind her. She takes hold of her glass of milk and tips it slightly towards her and peers through the liquid as though there might be something unimaginable lurking in the bottom of the glass. She glances quickly up at Elizabeth. ‘It’s nice to see you, Aunty Lizzy.’ She says quietly and with a sweet smile, but still no hug. Elizabeth leans over and puts her arms round her niece’s shoulder. ‘It’s nice to see you too, darling.’ She wants to fold her in a long rocking hug but she has to keep up with the changes.