A Postillion Struck by Lightning (5 page)

We washed up in silence, Lally washing up, we drying and putting away. She wiped her hands and lifted my satchel off the dresser and started to take out the roach. “Well, we'll have to make haste,” she said, breaking a longish silence and handling the fish with a practised hand, “because Miss Angelica Whassername will be here directly. She'll be on the six o'clock, and I've no doubt she'll want her supper sharpish after that long journey.”

The five roach didn't look much after she'd done all the innard thing and cut the heads off. She smelt them deeply, mentioned
that they must be fresh, it was just the mud, and washed them under the tap and flipped them on to an old blue plate. The innards and bits we gave to Minnehaha. Lally told us to get out from under her feet.

We went out and lay on the grass. If you looked straight up you saw the blue sky and one cloud: if you looked a bit to your left you could see the grass stalks as big as bamboos and a nodding scarlet poppy as big as a duster, and if you turned your head to the right you would see my sister wrinkling her eyes and picking her nose. I hit her.

“My finger was up my nose! I could have poked my eye out.” She lashed a fist at me and I rolled over and we fell into a struggling heap, laughing and howling and trying to sit on each other. In a little while we lay spent, breathless, giggling: our faces pressed into the grass, sniffing its greenness, and feeling the sun on the backs of our legs.

The Seaford bus was just rumbling into the village as we got to the Market Cross and stood waiting under the chestnut tree. It used to stop for a second outside Bakers to deliver odd packages or papers, and then it would trundle up and start reversing round the Cross so that it was pointing towards Seaford and the way it had just come. It used to arrive every evening at about six and leave again at six-thirty, and in the morning it arrived at nine-thirty and would leave again at ten and that's all it ever did. As far as we knew anyhow. Sometimes you could change buses at Polegate crossroads and go in a quite different direction, to Eastbourne, which was a very exciting thing to do. But usually we met it… and occasionally caught it in the morning, washed and combed with sixpence in our pockets from our father for shopping in Seaford. Which wasn't so exciting but was quite decent really because there were one or two good junk shops, and sometimes you could buy bound copies of “Chatterbox 1884” for 2d. We used to take a picnic lunch and eat that on the beach after we had done our shopping and a bit of swimming, and then we'd have tea at the Martello Tower, which was a very curious and dampish place but where we got lovely raspberry jam tarts and sometimes lemon curd ones. Lally used to have bloater paste and toast. But my sister and I just had an American Ice Cream Soda
and our tarts. Two each. And a smell of tea from the silver urns hissing on the counter, and hot butter and varnished wood. After tea we'd walk along the front a bit, have a look at the shops in Sea Street, and then back on to the bus for home.

The first person off the bus was Miss Maude Bentley in a grey wool frock and a black hat with a ribbon, and behind her, clambering down slowly as if she was being lowered on a rope, came Miss Ethel. And baskets and walking sticks which were handed down to her when she was safely on the ground by Fred Brooks the conductor. “There you are, my darlings,” he'd call out. “Off you go and don't get into trouble.” They were the rector's sisters and they had a little gift shop in the front room of their house. They sold writing pads and pencils and postcard views of the church and painted ones of Jesus and Mary and Mabel Lucie Attwell little girls. In the front hall, in a big china umbrella stand painted with bulrushes and yellow flags they had Lucky Dips for tuppence. You gave Miss Ethel or Miss Maude your money and then, while they watched to see you weren't cheating by squeezing the packets to tell what was inside, you could bury your two hands in the bran and fumble about for a little paper-wrapped parcel. Blue for a boy and pink for a girl. It was really a bit soppy and the prizes were rotten for tuppence. All I ever got was the three monkeys not seeing, speaking or hearing evil. That's all that boys
ever
got—except once I did see a boy get a very small penknife with a picture of “R.M.S. Majestic” on it—but usually it was the monkeys. They must have bought millions and millions of them. We said “Good evening”, and then some more people came off and there was Angelica Chesterfield. Angelica had very, very long black hair, and long legs and long arms and a long nose. She was altogether long, and a year older than us. She wore a black knitted cap with a red pom-pom and a long blue coat and shiny London shoes with ankle straps and white socks and we all smiled stupidly at each other and then I took her suitcase and we started to walk.

“Was it a boring journey?” I asked. She smoothed her hair, moved it over her shoulders, adjusted her pom-pom and said: “Not fearfully. Mummy put me on the train at Victoria and I had some books to look at and when we got to Seaford a lady said, ‘O! This is Seaford!' And I got off and said to a very nice man with a dog ‘Where does the bus go from,' and he said ‘Here,' and I got on and now I've got off.” She tripped over a stone in her
shiny black shoes and smiled. We turned down the lane towards the river and my sister said: “We've thought of some lovely things to do while you are here. We've found a very creepy caravan where a witch lives, and we'll take you to a sort of cave up by Wilmington we found and we know where there's a punt and we could go along the river and pick some waterlilies.” Angelica smiled again at us, pushed her hair over her shoulder again and said: “I like to read quite a lot.”

“Not all the time?” I said.

“Not
all
the time,” she agreed quietly, “but I do like it.”

“But it's summer. It's holidaytime!” said my sister. “You don't
read
on holidays.”

But Angelica smiled away and didn't say anything. We clattered across the bridge, her brown suitcase banging my legs and my heart sinking with every footfall. It was going to be a hateful week.

Lally was at the gate looking red and singing, a handful of wooden clothes pegs, and a big basket of washing in her arms. “Well! Here's Her Highness!” she called. “Have a good trip did you? I expect you're quite tired out and with that walk too. There's ginger beer in the kitchen and supper's at eight.”

The room where Angelica was going to sleep was through our room, through Lally's, and then through a little cupboard place. It was very small, with a bed, a chair and a table with a drawer. The window looked right down the meadow to High and Over; and on a clear day you could sometimes see the sea like a piece of silver paper. I put her suitcase on the table and said: “We have to tell you something. If you have to go to the lav in the night it's under the bed.” Angelica went white. “You've got the prettiest one,” said my sister reasonably. “It's got a pheasant on the bottom.” Angelica looked nervously round the room as if she expected it to rush out from under the bed or somewhere and peck her.

My sister humped the chamber pot on to the bed and looked at it with pleasure. Angelica did a wrinkling thing with her mouth and gently pulled off her pom-pom hat. “It's very nice,” she said flatly and smoothed her hat with her long thin fingers. I thought that she was going to cry. She often did. Usually did, in fact. Once when we were all on holiday together in Wimereux she cried and moaned all day because our father and her father were going out fishing in a little boat together, and she wanted to go too. And
they had to take her, and she was most dreadfully sick all day and we were jolly pleased. Because none of the rest of us were allowed to go, and she was the eldest and rotten. And here she was wrinkling up her mouth and smoothing her hat and blinking away, and I knew the tears were coming and just because of an old chamber pot.

“We caught you some fish today.”

She went on blinking. And smoothing.

“Because you're a Catholic,” said my sister.

“They aren't very big, but big enough, and Lally has cleaned them and everything.”

She stopped the blinking thing and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Thank you,” she said in a sort of twisty voice.

“Perhaps,” said my sister, “if you go to the lav just before we go to bed you won't need to use it. And then,” she said happily, “I can have it back.” She was holding the chamber up in the air like a tea-cup and looking at the marks on the bottom. “Or else I'll have to use my camel I won at the fair, and it's small.”

Angelica snuffled and buried her face in her pom-pom hat.

Sitting under the apple tree was rather pleasant after that. It was a lovely tree, old and sort of leaning away from the sea winds. The bark was all rumply and covered with moss and lichens, and on one branch there was a bunch of yellowy-green mistletoe growing. And that's why it was our most favourite tree. My sister was squashing the scarlet berries from some cuckoo-spit in a tin. She squelched them round and round with an old wooden spoon. We were making Hikers' Wine. When we had squashed them into a pulp we poured them into an orangeade bottle, with the label still on, and then filled it with water. Then we used to go and leave it in the gully at a good place, and hoped that a hiker, feeling thirsty, would spot it and think how lucky he was. And of course it was deadly poison and if he drank it he'd probably die, which was fearfully funny. We had done this with about five bottles and they had all gone when we went to look the next day. The gully was full of the beastly people all clambering up in khaki shorts and green or yellow shirts, to see the smallest church in England. And we thought that Hikers' Wine might put them off. Or kill them off. And it looked exactly like orangeade …
had the same colour, and little bits of skin and orange-sort-of-stuff swirling about in it. It was better than setting rabbit traps for them, which we did … but they always seemed to avoid them. Feet too big, I think.

“The trouble with her is,” said my sister, squashing away, “that she's potty.”

“I think it's because she's a Town person … and because she's going to be a Nun.”

My sister stopped squashing and looked at me with a mouth like an “O”.

“In Czechoslovakia,” I said.

“You're a fibber!”

“God's honour.”

“Who said?”

“I heard Aunt Freda tell our Mother.”

“Why is she going to be one in Czechoslovakia? Why not in Hampstead or somewhere?”

I took the tin away from her and did a bit of squashing, because they weren't quite mixed up and some of them looked like cuckoo-spit berries still.

“I don't know,” I said. “Probably that's where you have to go to be one. Probably it's a sort of factory place where they specially make Nuns.” We cried out with laughter. The sun was getting pale and a wind came shuddering up among the grasses making the lupins bend and nod like people agreeing. From the house was a good smell of frying. We squashed the berries into a paste and started to pour them into the bottle.