Crooked Heart (25 page)

T
he station was called Bramley Halt, and once the train had juddered off into the distance, only Vee and Noel were left standing on the platform. A crowd of sparrows twittered viciously in the bushes beside the footbridge.

‘Adelstrop,' said Noel.

‘What's that then?'

‘A poem about an express train stopping at a remote rural station on a hot afternoon, and no one gets on or off and the writer looks out of the window and sees meadowsweet and haycocks dry, no whit less still and lonely fair than the high cloudlets in the sky.'

‘That would have been in summer, though.'

‘Late June, the poem says.'

‘This time of year, he'd have had to write about muck spreaders.'

Noel snorted. ‘There are high cloudlets, though.'

‘That's true.' She tipped her head back to look at the sky, a milky blue dappled with white. ‘It's a nice enough day.'

They crossed the bridge and came out into a high-hedged lane, and Harry Pedder was there already, standing glumly beside a shining green motor car.

‘It's a Bentley!' said Noel. ‘A Bentley Speed Six!'

Harry nodded, grudgingly. ‘The 1933 model. Didn't know he was coming too,' he added, in Vee's direction.

‘We stick together,' she said, serenely. Harry opened the passenger door, and she didn't climb in straight away, but took a moment to enjoy the sensation of being waited on. The interior of the car was cream, and smelled of leather polish.

‘Come on, come on,' muttered Harry, ‘before somebody sees us.'

The seat was delicately sprung, and the dashboard a walnut veneer that shone like a rinsed plate. She'd once been given a lift in the back seat of the Methodist minister's Austin, but there was no comparison between that bruising journey, spent wedged between two hundred hymn books and a tea-urn, and her current glide between the hedgerows.

‘I wasn't expecting such a nice motor car,' said Vee. ‘Thank you.'

Harry nodded, tightly. ‘I've got to deliver it on afterwards, so don't think I'm doing it just for you.'

‘I meant what I said,' said Vee. ‘This'll be the last thing I ask of you. It's just that we had to visit the hospital and I couldn't quite face the walk.'

Harry grunted.

‘How's business?' asked Vee.

‘It's all government regulations, something new every week, one flaming headache after another.'

‘And the family? Children all well?'

He gave her a look and she smiled demurely.

‘Only asking.'

‘Well don't.'

‘I had a ride in a Bugatti once,' piped Noel, from the back.

They travelled in silence for a while, and twice Vee saw Harry steal a glance at her face.

‘What's the matter?' she said. ‘Looking at my scar?'

‘It's not so bad,' he said. ‘Thought it would be a lot worse
underneath all those bandages. Gave me a hell of a shock when you turned up at the garage looking like the curse of the mummy with him in tow. Who is he, anyway?'

‘My nephew,' she said, blandly.

‘Doesn't seem right to mix up a child in all this.'

‘All what?'

‘Your schemes. There are names for what you did,' he added, censoriously. ‘Blackmail and forgery.'

‘As a matter of fact, it was his idea,' said Vee. ‘He asked if there was anyone official I had the goods on.'

‘Had the what?'

‘It's an American phrase. We'd been reading a detective book by a Mr Raymond Chandler. So I thought of you, Harry, and your connections and your yard full of red petrol. Ooh look, Noel – lambs!' She watched a field of sheep whisk past. Ahead, the extravagant roof-scape of Doulton Grange Asylum – all cupolas and dormers and twisted chimneys – was showing above the treetops.

‘Nearly there,' she said.

Noel had half-expected a scene out of a Hogarth print – cell after cell of lunatics dressed as Napoleon or Julius Caesar, deranged laughter echoing along the corridors; instead, he and Vee were shown into a cream-painted day room where the main noise was the sizzle of a poorly tuned wireless. Beneath the static, the sound of a dance-band flared and receded, as if someone were opening and shutting a door.

A number of small tables were scattered around the room, with two or three people sitting at each; it looked rather like a whist drive, except that there were no cards and no one appeared to be having fun. A man at the nearest table was knitting, the needles held about an inch in front of his face, a narrow khaki snake drooping between them.

‘Occupational therapy,' said Vee. ‘They used to teach them
how to make fireside fans out of waxed paper, but I suppose knitting's more useful.'

Noel was scanning the room.

‘Or sometimes they'd have to glue seashells on to boxes, but I don't suppose you can get the shells now.' The place was plucking at her nerves. ‘Or the glue,' she added. ‘Or the boxes.'

‘Mrs Gifford's over by the window,' said Noel; he recognized her profile, beaky and spare, her jaw moving as she talked to the woman beside her.

‘Go on then,' said Vee.

He hesitated, fingering the cloth pouch in his pocket, sudden panic drying his mouth, because whether Mrs Gifford welcomed his gift or threw it out of the window, it was the end of something – the quest completed, the curtain drawn – and he didn't know, couldn't imagine, what would come afterwards.

‘Do you want me along with you?' asked Vee.

‘Yes. No.'

‘Which is it?'

‘No. I'd rather see her on my own.'

‘All right then. I'll wait here.' She sounded relieved.

He took a couple of breaths, as if about to duck underwater, and then walked across the room and Mrs Gifford's voice came out to meet him, a purling stream of reminiscence into which he was instantly incorporated: ‘. . . she gave us a cheese as large as a cartwheel and Ada suggested we roll it down the hill only we had to borrow the Hadleys' donkey cart to get it up there and here's young Hadley now, have you finished your prep?'

‘Yes,' said Noel. She was tidier than when he'd seen her last, her hair neatly plaited, her clothes ill-fitting but clean; she smelled of carbolic.

‘I don't have any eggs,' complained the other woman at the table, shrivelled in shawls. ‘If we had eggs I could show you how to make the perfect Victoria . . .'

‘We threw eggs at the Member for Haverford West, I was
always a crack shot, Lena Fitzackerly said I could have bowled for Surrey. I expect you're awfully hungry after cricket practice, I shall ring for tea and sugared buns. Do take a seat . . .'

‘. . . sift the flour. You have to sift it . . .'

‘. . . the gardener will be here directly, I simply must compliment him on the rhododendrons, did you ever see blooms like it? I believe they call that colour
cerise
. . .'

Noel sat, and the two conversations flowed onward, twin currents mingling and then diverging, Mrs Gifford animated, the other woman talking grimly at the tabletop, imparting a lifetime of kitchen skills to a small section of oilcloth.

‘Do you remember me, Mrs Gifford?' asked Noel. Her gaze dabbed at him and then bounced off again.

‘Of course, you're Gloria Kennedy's little nephew, I last saw you in your petticoats on the lawn outside the Woodfields' house—'

‘No, it was last September.'

‘And it was a particularly lovely autumn, we had baskets and baskets of damsons.'

‘I had a collecting box and you gave me a lot of money. You were living in an upstairs room in Chetwynd Street and the first time you invited us in' – he raised his voice over hers – ‘the first time you invited us in you were wearing a Hunger Strike medal.'

There was a hitch in Mrs Gifford's speech, the stream burbling over a snag. She talked on, but her eyes darted towards Noel again, following his movements as he took the cloth pouch from his pocket.

‘And the reason I knew it was a Hunger Strike medal,' he said, feeling around inside the bag, ‘was because my godmother had one too.'

He clinked the silver disc on to the table, citation uppermost, and Mrs Gifford peered at it, her speech briefly petering out before suddenly resuming.

‘Ah yes, Matilda Simpkin, though of course we called her Mattie.'

Noel's head jerked back. Hearing the name out loud was like being smacked with a pillow – a buffet both shocking and pleasurable.

‘Mattie Simpkin,' said Mrs Gifford again. ‘Did you know that she could whistle and hum at the same time?'

He nodded, though he didn't dare speak, didn't dare
breathe
in case he broke the tiny thread of memory. Mrs Gifford's eyes held his, grey-green and quite sensible.

‘We'd all sing “Bread and Roses” in our cells after lights out: “As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days”, and then Mattie Simpkin would whistle and hum the chorus and I'd lean my head against the water pipes so I could hear her.'

‘You should always have cold hands for pastry,' said the other woman, ‘and warm hands for bread and you must put the butter on ice for at least half an hour before making pastry.'

Mrs Gifford's gaze shifted. ‘There was a skating party at Lancing last week,' she remarked, ‘and Agnes Calder went through the ice clear up to her hips.'

She was gone again, and it was as if he'd just glimpsed Mattie round the edge of a closing door; Mattie, present and correct, Mattie splendid, solid, brave and loud. He picked up the medal and grasped it so tightly that the edge dug into his palm and then he dropped it back into the pouch and held it out to Mrs Gifford.

‘This is for you,' he said.

She took it from him without apparent interest, tucked it into the pocket of her cardigan and carried on talking, and Noel stood up, his legs feeling clumsy and cold. He turned to see Vee coming across the room towards him and he realized, with a strange sort of shock, that he was pleased to see her.

‘All done?'

He nodded. ‘She knew Mattie, she remembered her.'

‘That's good. Can we go now? This place gives me the whinwans.'

He turned the word over in his head as they walked back along the corridor.

‘What are “whinwans”?'

‘Have you never heard that word before?'

‘No.'

‘That's a first. I suppose it means the creeps.'

‘What's its origin?'

‘I've no idea, it's just what people say round here. Tell you what, that can be your next bit of homework.'

‘The etymology of “whinwan”?'

She nodded. ‘Discuss.' She gave him a sidelong glance. ‘You're smiling.'

‘I do smile sometimes.'

‘Not often enough.'

She let him sit in the front seat of the Bentley on the way back to the station.

T
he bombing stopped in May, though it took weeks for them to lose the habit of nightly fear, to straighten up, like grass after the roller has been shifted.

June was bright and warm, day after day of brilliant skies, and Vee began to feel restless. She found herself staring at the Red Cross collector outside the Co-op, envying the jolly rattle of coins into the box; it took an effort to shove the thought away.

She was bored, she decided.

‘I might put a card in the newsagent's window,' she said to Noel.

‘Why?'

‘Clothing alteration and fancy work. Do you think that's the sort of thing your Auntie Margery might do?'

‘I don't see why not.' He was weighing flour, frowning at the scales, a recipe for potato pie propped against the colander. He was good at cooking, she'd discovered; moreover, he actually
enjoyed
it. One day he might make someone an unusually useful husband, though she suspected he'd end up in bachelor quarters in an Oxford college, being waited on.

‘The telephone's working again now,' she said. ‘Mostly, anyway. I could put our number.'

‘All right.'

‘The only thing is . . .' She paused until he turned to look at her. There was a white smudge on his chin.

‘What?'

‘You might be the one to answer it. And then you'd have to say, “I'll just go and get my aunt.” Or you'd have to sing out for me if I was upstairs, or in the garden, or in the kitchen. Wouldn't you?'

He waited for her to start making sense.

‘You don't call me anything,' she said. ‘You don't have a name for me. You don't even say “Aunt”.'

‘Don't I?'

‘You must have noticed.'

He shook his head.

‘Well, do you think you could try? There are going to be times when we have to talk to other people. How about “Auntie”? Or “Auntie Margery”?' Though she could hear the lack of conviction in her own voice; she didn't feel like an auntie or a Margery.

‘I just used Mattie's first name. Can't I do that?'

Vee sighed. ‘All right then, though people will find it odd. Maybe you could shorten it a bit. Marge sounds better than Margery.'

He went back to his pastry-making and Vee found a stub of pencil and the back of a sheet of drawer-liner and started to work on her advertisement.

‘How many fs in “professional”?'

‘One. You know you said I could call you Marge?'

‘Yes.'

‘What if I shortened it even more?'

‘To what?'

‘Mar.'

She looked round, but his back was to her, his ears silhouetted against the window. A puff of flour ballooned up from the bowl.

‘Mar,' she repeated, tasting the word, letting it melt on her tongue like a sugar-lump. ‘I don't mind that. I've been called worse.'

I'd never have finished
Crooked Heart
without the friendship, support and advice of Kate Anthony and Gaby Chiappe, the two writers to whom it's dedicated. Thanks too to Georgia Garrett (as always) and to Bill Scott-Kerr, who, despite having to wait years and years and
years
for this book, remained unfailingly patient and encouraging. And finally, thanks to the
Herts Advertiser
and
St Albans Times
(now defunct) for being the source of much inspiration.