Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War Read online

  Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War

  Vernon Coleman

  Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War by Vernon Coleman is the book upon which the hugely popular film of the same name was based.

  You can find out more about other books by Vernon Coleman (including Mrs Caldicot’s Knickerbocker Glory – the sequel to Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War) by visiting http://www.vernoncoleman.com/

  First published by Chilton Designs in 1993

  Copyright Vernon Coleman 1993

  The right of Vernon Coleman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mrs Caldicot didn't really like the way her husband imperiously banged his spoon on the side of his cup when he wanted it refilled with tea. But she didn't say anything. She stared at the freckled top of his bald head for a moment (the rest of it was hidden behind his morning newspaper), got up from the breakfast table, picked up the milk jug and the teapot and carefully refilled his cup, making sure that she mixed together just the right amount of milk and tea. For a brief moment she was tempted to leave him to add his own sugar but even that small act of defiance was too much for her, and so she carefully tipped two spoons of sugar into his cup.

  However, as she stirred the mixture she deliberately allowed the spoon to bang against the side of the cup. She knew that the noise would annoy him. She didn't want to annoy him simply because she didn't like him, but rather because it was really the only way of reminding herself that she had some freedom left.

  For Mrs Caldicot, letting the teaspoon bang against the side of his cup was the equivalent of jumping onto the table, screaming as loudly as she could and tearing off all her clothes. It was an act of defiance which thrilled her and which reminded her, in its modest way, that she was still, just about, an independent being with a mind and a will of her own. She had started doing little things like this after reading a book on assertiveness which she had borrowed from the public library. She felt a wave of nervous anxiety enveloping her; tiny beads of perspiration broke out on her forehead, her heart beat faster and she could feel the colicky pains she knew so well and dreaded so much beginning to grow in her tummy.

  `Do you have to make so much noise?' demanded Mr Caldicot gruffly, without looking up from his newspaper. It was the first time he had spoken since they had got up.

  Mrs Caldicot felt herself blushing and pulled the collar of her dressing gown up a little higher to hide the bright red rash that she knew was developing.

  `I wish I had a machine gun,' she thought. `Then you'd hear some noise!' These unusual thoughts had started slipping into her mind more and more often, and although she found them slightly alarming she also found them rather exciting. She realised, with some considerable surprise, that she quite liked the idea of mowing down her husband with a hail of machine gun bullets.

  `I'm sorry, dear,' she apologised, not so much because she was contrite over the rattled tea spoon but more because she was overcome with guilt at having so enjoyed the thought of the machine gun massacre. She glanced at the kitchen clock. `It's twenty minutes to eight,' she reminded him gently and timidly. It was the cricket season, the county side was playing at home and Mr Caldicot, a loyal and faithful member for forty three years, never missed a home match. The game did not start until eleven but Mr Caldicot always arrived at the ground a full two hours early. He liked to be there before anyone else to make sure that no one else sat in his seat. A double glazing salesman had once sat on Mr Caldicot's preferred section of wooden bench and Mr Caldicot had responded by sinking into a deep depression for two months.

  Mr Caldicot moved his head slightly to one side, lowered his head a fraction of an inch and looked up over the top of his spectacles so that he could examine the clock to confirm the time. Mrs Caldicot hated him even more than usual when he did this. She felt that he did it deliberately just to let her know that he didn't even trust her to tell the time properly. He popped the last piece of toast into his mouth and chewed on it noisily. His dentures were ill-fitting and needed replacing but he was too mean a man to spend money on replacing dentures which still had a few thousand chews left in them. Occasionally, when he was eating, they would slip out of his mouth and he would have to push them back into place with an inelegant flick of the wrist. This unattractive habit never seemed to embarrass him.

  He cleared his throat. `Hrrmph!' Then he pushed back his chair and folded his newspaper before placing it neatly next to his plate. He sipped at his tea, decided that it was too hot to drink for the moment, got up from the table and headed for the stairs to finish dressing. Mr Caldicot's attire was predictable and Mrs Caldicot knew exactly how he would be dressed when he reappeared. Whatever the weather he always wore a three piece suit, a white shirt and his county supporter's tie when going to watch a cricket match. She longed for him to astonish her in some way, but knew that he never would. His underpants were always white, his socks were always grey and woollen and the ends of his shoelaces were always of matching length.

  `Are my sandwiches ready?'

  Mr Caldicot had paused in the doorway before going upstairs to dress.

  Mrs Caldicot felt like a schoolgirl being addressed by a stern headmaster. `Yes, sir, no sir, three bags full sir,' she thought. `They're in the fridge, dear,' she said. `I'll get them out when I've filled your flask.' She realised that instead of `dear' she had very nearly said `sir' and she swallowed hard. She wondered if he would have noticed if she had said `sir', and decided that even if he had he would not have thought it odd. Indeed, he would have almost certainly liked it. The machine gun image came back and she savoured the sight for a moment.

  `Beef paste?'

  `Yes, dear.'

  `I didn't like that fishy stuff.'

  `Well hard luck! Why don't you make your own sandwiches you nasty, selfish, self-centred little man,' she thought. `Tuna? No, I know, dear,' she said. `You told me.' Mrs Caldicot should have known better than to try experimenting with the contents of her husband's packed luncheon; the tuna fish had not gone down well, though it had not, she remembered, been as unpopular as the cucumber. She had once put cucumber on his sandwiches and he had reminded her of his dislike for cucumber every morning for the rest of the cricketing summer. He rarely told her what he liked, only what he didn't like. She couldn't remember him ever praising her for anything.

  `And not an apple.'

  `Yes, dear.'

  `The skins on those apples you bought are too tough. The one I had yesterday got stuck in my teeth.'

  `What a pity it didn't choke you,' thought Mrs Caldicot. `I'm sorry,' she said aloud, in a simper which immediately made her feel ashamed and angry with herself. `I'll put a banana in your box.'

  `My brown suit needs cleaning,' said Mr Caldicot, still standing at the foot of the stairs. `And while you're in town call at the seed merchant's and get me some more plant fertiliser.`

  `What did your last slave die of?' thought Mrs Caldicot, who had not planned to go into town at all. `All right, dear,' she said.

  While Mr Caldicot disappeared back upstairs to fiddle with cufflinks and collar studs, Mrs Caldicot filled her husband's flask with tea, nervously selected a banana with just the right mixture of brown and yellow in its skin and took the small packet of sandwiches she had made the night before and put them into an airtight plastic box. Then she wrapped two small home-made rock cakes in greaseproof paper and added them to the box. She put the flask, the banana and the sandwich box alongside the folded newspaper but she didn't put them into his polished brown leather briefcase even t
hough it was leaning against the wall no more than a few feet away. Mr Caldicot liked to pack his briefcase himself. When all this was done Mrs Caldicot switched the kettle on again, put two slices of bread into the toaster and made her own breakfast.

  When he came downstairs Mr Caldicot finished his cup of tea and packed his sandwich box, his flask, his banana and his newspaper into his briefcase.

  `I'll be in the members' pavilion if anyone wants me,' he said. He had said the same thing for as long as Mrs Caldicot could remember but no one had ever wanted him. He did not ask her how she was planning to spend her day and nor had he ever done so.

  `Who do you think cares a fig where you are?' she thought. `Yes, dear,' she said. She glanced at the clock as her husband left. It was twenty minutes past eight. She heard the garage doors creak open and the sound of their motorcar starting up. It would be eleven hours before her husband returned home. She sat down and turned on the wireless. On the news station two politicians were discussing Northern Ireland. On the entertainment station a disc jockey was talking about a group she'd never heard of and a concert he'd been to which sounded momentously dull and uneventful. Mrs Caldicot turned the wireless off.

  She contemplated the possibilities. She could go down to the Oxfam shop to help sort through other people’s unwanted clothes, books and household bits and pieces. She could go to the supermarket to restock the pantry with essential household comestibles. Or she could give the house a good spring clean.

  None of these options filled her with anything approaching excitement or anticipation.

  Mrs Caldicot didn't really know what was wrong with her. She had never really felt like this before. She had spent most of her life keeping Mr Caldicot's socks in pairs and satisfying his increasingly obsessional likes and dislikes, but she had never before felt quite so unsatisfied by her life. Matching socks had never been something she had regarded as fulfilling but she had, nevertheless, always been a relatively contented woman. With considerable reluctance she realised that she was beginning to feel frustrated by an existence which seemed more and more pointless and purposeless. Worst of all was the strange and pervasive feeling of loneliness which seemed to leave her. Even at the Oxfam shop, surrounded by plump and cheerful friends, she felt inexplicably alone. She wished there was a patron saint to look after the downtrodden, the downhearted and the constantly put upon, and yet at the same time she felt ashamed of her own lack of strength and her inability to solve her predicament.

  She closed her eyes and tried to use a relaxation technique she had read about in a book on stress. It involved imagining that she was lying on a beach on a desert island. But Kitty the cat leapt on her lap just as she had begun the imaginary journey to her promised haven of temporary peace, and the journey ended almost before it had begun.

  She got up from the table and started to wash the breakfast plates. She wondered if she was depressed but quickly decided that it was irrelevant she wasn't going to see the doctor anyway. The last time she had visited him, eight years earlier, he had put her on pills which he had promised would calm her nerves. They had done that effectively for two weeks but it had then taken her three years to escape from their pharmacological clutches and she no longer trusted him or any of his pills.

  As she squirted washing-up liquid into the bowl of hot water she felt a sudden urge to run away; to put Kitty into her wicker basket, to pack a small bag and to leave. But she didn't know where she would go, and she realised with some anguish that this was not because she didn't have anywhere that she could go to but because anywhere would be better than where she was. She had so many places from which she could choose that she couldn't decide which one to select.

  She turned the wireless on again.

  On the news station a man with a boring, whiny voice was talking about the boundaries of art in the gay community. On the entertainment station an overly cheerful youth with a relentlessly patronising manner was reading out a recipe for cheese omelette and cracking little jokes between each of the ingredients.

  She reached out and turned the radio off with a firm flick of her wrist. She thought for a moment about switching on the television but just as quickly suppressed the thought. She could not bear the incessantly cheerful litany of banal banter with which the broadcasters sought to liven her morning. She had long ago realised that the very predictability of their inanity was more than adequate proof that they knew that she was bored and lonely and she did not want what amounted to little more than electronic pity.

  She sat down, silent and lonely, and allowed an endless series of irrelevant worries to drift in and out of her mind. She wondered if everyone worried as much as she did about things and decided that they couldn't possibly because if they did then they'd never have the energy to get anything done.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mrs Caldicot was in the kitchen cutting radishes into little flowers when two very young police officers came to tell her that her husband had died.

  They were extremely nice about it.

  `Mrs Caldicot?' asked the boy policeman. He had huge, pink, ears which stuck out at right angles to the side of his head and his face was covered in spots. He was trying to grow a moustache.

  `That's right,' replied Mrs Caldicot, wiping her hands on a tea towel. `Is it about my Aunt Hannah?' She opened the door wide and stood back. `You'd better come in. We've been expecting it.' She felt her palpitations come back again and the colicky pains in her tummy made her wince inwardly, though she proudly refused to show her discomfort to these strangers. The worries and anxieties that had been popping in and out of her mind still nagged at her and she put them neatly in order so that she could worry about them later. None of them was important enough to survive the next half an hour.

  Mrs Caldicot's Aunt Hannah lived in an alms house twelve miles away and had been dying for over a quarter of a century.

  The boy policeman fidgeted with his helmet. He looked at his companion, the girl policewoman. She looked even younger than him. She had a little pug nose, dark brown eyes and her hat came down so far over her head that she didn't seem to have any hair at all. Her shapeless uniform was too big for her and Mrs Caldicot wondered if her mother knew where she was. She also thought that the uniform looked rather itchy and uncomfortable and was glad that she wasn't in the police force. She remembered that when she had been in the maternity hospital giving birth to her son Derek she had been in a bed next to a girl called Brenda who had been married to a police constable. The police constable had given her a hug and a kiss the day she had been leaving the hospital and if she closed her eyes and worked her memory and imagination hard she could still feel the texture of his uniform.

  `It's about your husband,' said the girl policewoman. `Mr Caldicot,' she added, lest there be any doubt about the identity of Mrs Caldicot's spouse.

  Mrs Caldicot felt a sudden frisson of alarm run down her spine and she felt a wave of guilt flowing over her as she realised that the sense of alarm had been triggered not by any fear for her husband but by fear for herself. She knew instantly that her life was about to change though she did not know precisely how or in what way. It annoyed her that she could not remember the name of Brenda's husband.

  `He's been taken ill,' continued the girl policewoman.

  `Very ill,' said the boy policeman. `Can we come in?'

  `You'd better come in,' said Mrs Caldicot. Her husband was never ill. He did not allow illness to interfere with his carefully organised life. How, she wondered, could any disease have dared to find its way, uninvited and unwelcome, into his ordered existence. She wondered if the policeman who had hugged her had been called Bert. He had, she remembered, a huge bristly moustache and she had never before (or since for that matter) been kissed by a man with a moustache.

  The girl policewoman and the boy policeman squeezed into Mrs Caldicot's front hall and Mrs Caldicot reached around them to shut the front door.

  `First on your right,' said Mrs Caldicot. `The living room.' She knew that she shoul
d have asked them immediately what had happened but somehow she felt that the longer she could delay the finding out the better it might be for all of them.

  They stood together in the middle of the small room which now suddenly seemed overcrowded with furniture. The girl policewoman looked around and Mrs Caldicot looked around with her and seemed to see the room for the first time. There was a three piece suite with floral patterned covers, an imitation oak glass- fronted bookcase filled with book club editions and paperbacks and a smart new Japanese television set on a metal and plastic table.

  Kitty, was curled up dozing on one of the chairs. She looked up and opened an eye when they entered but did not move. Kitty didn't mind strangers. No one sat down. The girl policewoman had taken off her hat and like her colleague she was holding it in her hands and turning it round and round.

  `He was at the cricket match,' said the boy policeman.

  `At Mettleham County Ground,' added the girl policewoman.

  `I know,' said Mrs Caldicot. `He always goes to the cricket when they're playing at home. He's a member.' She suddenly realised that she knew that her husband was dead and that she had known this since she had seen the two police officers standing on the doorstep. She wondered whether or not she would cry when they told her, and whether or not they would expect her to cry, and whether they might be disappointed if she didn't cry. Inexplicably, she suddenly thought of the time she had gone to night school to study French. Fearing that her intellect was withering she had tried to persuade Mr Caldicot to go with her to an evening class. He had refused and had consented to her signing up with bad grace. When she had completed her course she had suggested a holiday in France or, at the very least, a short weekend in Paris. But he had refused. When she had diffidently suggested that she might go to Paris with a group being organised by other students he had refused to countenance such a trip. She thought that had probably been the beginning of the end of their love. She never said anything at the time, of course, but she shrank deeper and deeper into her shell, and after that she had started thinking her strange thoughts. The more she tried to repress these thoughts with a veneer of quiet and artificial contentment, the more the thoughts struggled to the surface.