Crooked Heart (5 page)

‘She looks nice,' said Ada again.

‘And there isn't just a chance you could also see your way to taking . . . ?' The billeting officer nodded over at Ada.

‘No,' said Vee, quickly.

‘I quite understand. Off you go now, Noel. He's a quiet little chap, Mrs Sedge.'

Noel picked up his suitcase.

‘I'll carry that,' said Vee, taking it from him. ‘Weighs a ton,' she added. ‘What've you got in here? Bricks?'

She walked fast, and Noel limped alongside her. Ada was wrong, he thought; she didn't look particularly nice. She had sharp, worried features and she kept moving her head around, keeping a watch on everything, like a magpie hanging around a picnic.

‘Here we are,' she said, stopping outside a shabby building that Noel had passed twice before. ‘Up the steps we go.'

He stumbled three times on the stairs.

‘Oops-a-daisy,' said Vee. ‘Not too good on your pins, are you?' She sounded almost pleased. ‘In here,' she said. ‘Mum, look who I've brought.'

The older woman took off a pair of headphones, gave Noel a plaintive stare, then propped up a small slate, and chalked a question mark on it.

‘It's an evacuee, Mum. Sit yourself down,' she said to Noel. She untied her headscarf and fluffed her curly, dark hair. ‘You want some bread and marge?'

He nodded.

‘Write your postcard, then,' she said.

He lowered himself on to a stool and sat there, rubbing his knees awkwardly. The room was cramped and comfortless, the bare floorboards patched with a couple of balding rugs. Vee's mother was sitting in the only armchair, a crocheted shawl round her shoulders, small cushions tucked behind her back and under her elbows, her slippered feet resting on a folded blanket. There was a cup of tea on the table in front of her, and a handkerchief, a slate and a piece of chalk, a copy of the
Radio Times
and a packet of Parma Violets. As he watched, Vee's mother took one of the latter and popped it in her mouth. She didn't look very much like her daughter; she was tiny, with sweet, rounded features, and fine brown hair pulled into a bun. A scar, like a delicate white thread, ran right across her forehead, just below the hairline.

‘Here you are,' said Vee, holding out a plate to Noel. ‘Not written it yet?' she added.

‘I don't have a pen,' he said.

Posh, she thought. A posh voice. She brought him a pencil.

‘And where's the card?'

Reluctantly, he nodded at the suitcase. She knelt swiftly – she seemed to do everything at speed – and flipped the catches. The postcard lay on top.

‘My stars,' she said, staring at the other contents. ‘What's that?'

‘An ammonite.'

‘Your mum packed a
rock
for you? And what's that?'

‘A coat.'

She rubbed the fur between her fingers. ‘Beaver. Feel the weight of it.' Without asking, she pushed the coat aside, stacked his bedroom slippers on top of it, glanced at the cover of
The Roman Hat Mystery
by Ellery Queen, opened the notebook and riffled through the pages, pounced on his ration book, and then
raked quickly through the shorts, shirt and underwear that he'd stuffed at the bottom of the case. ‘That's all your clothes?' she asked.

He nodded. He'd thrown all the others under the bed at Mafeking Road, to make room for Mattie's coat.

‘And what's in here?' she asked, reaching for the brown paper bag he'd been given at Charing Cross. He watched her open it. For a second or two, her expression softened. ‘You eat up,' she said, taking the bag over to the kitchen cupboard.

Reverently, she placed the contents on the top shelf: corned beef; shortbread; two cans of milk; a quarter-pound of chocolate. She could give Donald a couple of squares in his snack-box every day this week, as a treat. It might make up for the fact that Noel would have to sleep in Donald's room – in Donald's bed, actually, since there wasn't a spare. Though that could work out nicely, since Donald only slept there during the day. Less nicely, of course, if the boy was one of those bed-wetters.

If that were the case, then she'd have to try and get a camp bed from somewhere. And then there'd be all those extra sheets to wash and dry. And of course, with one extra in the flat there'd be more cooking, more shopping, more ironing, more water to heat and carry, more clothes to mend, and shoes to buy, not to mention visits from prying parents . . .

She had the familiar sensation of the ground crumbling beneath her, as if she were standing on a sandcastle. It always happened like this: a fresh idea, a few seconds – or even hours – of happy triumph, and then,
whoosh
, in would come the tide. Next thing she knew, she'd be neck-deep in consequences and drawbacks.

The boy was sitting with the postcard in front of him, the pencil untouched.

‘It's care of Sedge, Croxton's Scrap Metal, Pollard Lane, St
Albans,' she said. He didn't move and it occurred to her that he wasn't writing it down because he didn't know how to; his notebook had been full of scribbles and silly patterns.

‘Give it to me,' she said, and eased it out of his hands. She wrote the address.

‘Any message?' she asked. He shook his head. She added

AM STAYING WITH A VERY NICE LADY AND HER KIND FAMILY. I WISH WE COULD GIVE THEM A PRESENT TO SAY THANK YOU, SUCH AS TINNED GOODS OR EVEN A POSTAL ORDER JUST TO TIDE HER OVER UNTIL THE GOVERNMENT ALLOWANCE COMES.

‘And where do you live?' she asked, turning the card over.

He said nothing.

‘With your mum and dad, is it?'

He stayed silent. He was a plain child, his face not quite symmetrical, his ears just asking to be gripped between finger and thumb by a passing bully.

‘We have to send it,' she said, ‘or I expect there'll be trouble.'

‘Dr M. Simpkin, “Green Shutters”, Vale of Health, Hampstead, London,' he said, quickly.

‘Who's that then? Your dad? Your grandpa?'

‘Godmother.'

‘So where's your mum and dad?'

He closed his mouth firmly, like someone shutting a sash window. There was, she realized, a piece of string around his neck. She leaned forward and pulled on it and a brown label emerged from the neck of his shirt. He made a grab for it.

‘Noel Bostock,' she read out loud, fending his hand away. She turned it over. ‘C/o Mr and Mrs G. Overs, 23B Mafeking Road, Kentish Town, London. Who are they, then?'

He shrugged. Then, without warning, he pulled the label off so violently that he left a red mark round his neck.

‘That was a silly thing to do, wasn't it?' asked Vee. ‘Now sit there like a good boy. I've got things to do.'

She made a pot of tea, and then put up the blackouts and got out the flowers that she had to finish for Vic Allerby for Tuesday: three hundred violets for the hat trade, or what remained of it. Green gauze leaves, purple crêpe petals, yellow felt centres, with a ribbon-wrapped wire for the stem. Each one took her a shade under ninety seconds to complete.

Noel sat and watched her fingers stitching the leaves to the petals, pushing the wire through the centre, giving the end a twist, sticking on the yellow anthers with a dab of glue and then tacking the completed flower to a length of brown cloth. She kept her eyes on the work, but she seemed to be having a long, soundless conversation with somebody, her mouth moving, her expression changing with the rapidity of a flicker book. The only noise in the room was the squeak of Arthur Askey from the headphones, and the occasional sigh from Vee's mother, as her pen looped across a sheet of writing paper. She wrote in a hand so regular that he could read it upside down. She appeared to be writing to the Prime Minister, though this was clearly impossible. After a while he laid his chin on his hands and went to sleep.

 

Dear Mr Churchill,

As I wrote to Mr Chamberlain in April, you never know just what's round the corner. As I hope Mr Chamberlain told you I've been corresponding with him for many years, and his secretary wrote a very nice reply in 1935 to say that he's always happy to know what the Ordinary Folk of England are saying. As a Mother and Grandmother, as well as a Christian who has laboured under a cruel affliction for many years, I feel its my duty to pass on the fruits of my contemplations.

 

       
1. The bread is very bad. It has bits that keep being caught under my upper plate, I think there might be dirt in the flour. Also, you can't slice it thinly it's like sawing a log, everyone says this. Our minister (Methodist) kindly visited me at home this week and a piece of crust caught in his throat and he might have died if my daughter hadn't hit him on the back with a shoe. On the wireless they talk about morale and I think soft white rolls would do more for morale than all the National Anthems of the Allies put together. They play them week in, week out on the wireless and the Dutch one sounds like a funeral.

 

       
2. Never mind about the French, no one here is surprised. They'd have been surprised if the French had stayed and fought, that would've been a surprise all right.

 

       
3. There are many people Making Hay in this war and downstairs from us they are selling stolen things I heard them talking about silver-plated spoons just yesterday. It's the blackout makes thieving easy and I think
you ought to know that the specials aren't any good they'll take anyone in the police nowadays. My friend from chapel's husband is a special and he cant even bend one of his knees and he's been deaf in one ear since Arras I should think thieves probably just laugh at him. About the spoons, I mention no names but it's a scrap metal firm half a mile south-west of St Albans. Also there are Irish people in and out of there all the time.

 

       
4. We had a pamphlet brought to us by the postman about what to do if a Parachutist Should Come to Our Door and of course I read it and the advice was mostly to stay put and be calm, quick and exact when I'd have thought that dropping heavy things (like an iron) out of the window on their heads would be more useful, or boiling water. Also my cousin Harold suggested putting needles in bread rolls on the road to cause punctures and this would be another reason for having soft white rolls, you couldn't push needles in the bread we have nowadays, they'd bend (a little joke).

 

Well, if you don't mind I'll leave you with a poem that was in ‘People's Friend' in the spring.

 

         
When all the world is sad and grey

         
And all your hope seems far away

         
Look up and see the sky so blue

         
And know that joy is there for you.

 

Yours faithfully

Flora Sedge

N
oel had occasionally been into a church, but never one made of tin. The outside was painted pale green and there were no pews inside, only rush-bottomed chairs. The sole decor ation (unless you counted the jar of ox-eye daisies on the altar) was an embroidered banner that read
Fight the Good Fight of Faith
.

‘The Iron Duke . . .' said Mr Waring, his voice beginning to fray as he stretched it over the rows of juniors. ‘The Iron Duke was a nickname for which famous nineteenth-century military figure?'

‘Colonel Bogey!' shouted Roy Pursey.

‘And are there any serious suggestions?'

Someone blew a raspberry.

‘Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington,' said Mr Waring, ‘one of the subjects of our lesson this morning. Does everyone have a slate?'

There was no paper, there were no pencils. The slates had been found in the Sunday School cupboard, and three pieces of chalk had been cut into slivers using Mr Waring's penknife.

‘Tomorrow, or the next day,' said Mr Waring, ‘I am assured that we shall be found more suitable accommodation, but in the meantime I would like you to list
twenty
eminent Victorians, men
or
women who contributed to the public good during the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837 to 1901. Anyone who writes
“Jack the Ripper” will be required to compose a three-page essay on the subject of “public good”. You have ten minutes to compile this list, and during these ten minutes I would like absolute silence.'

Above the gruesome scrape of chalk, Miss Lane could be heard reading out a story about kittens to a semicircle of seven-year-olds over by the open front doors. And in the cloakroom, the infants were singing ‘Ten Green Bottles', except they had started with one hundred bottles rather than ten. The song had been going on half an hour, and they had still only reached twenty-two.

Noel picked up his flake of chalk and wrote
Gnrvjtjm Okrlyouojup
. It was a simple slip code, once down the alphabet for letter one, twice for letter two and so on, but it made
Florence Nightingale
look like a Norse God.

He crushed the chalk between his fingers and dusted his hands. He didn't want to compile a list of eminent Victorians. He didn't want to be sitting here, in this hot metal box. He didn't want to be anywhere; the world felt like a horsehair vest that he couldn't remove. He opened his notebook and wrote down the names of his classmates, and then appended a suitable punishment to each.

         
Roy Pursey. Liver pecked out by eagle.

         
Harvey Madeley. Locked into an oubliette and forced to drink own urine.

         
The Ferris Twins. Lavatory cleaners.

‘I have just been informed,' said Mr Waring, staring at a note in his hand, ‘that since these premises are used for first-aid training on Monday afternoons, our lessons will be terminated at midday. All right, all right . . .' He acknowledged the ragged cheer with an upraised hand. ‘Carry on with your work.'

Eggs, potatoes, Sanatogen, thought Vee, who had forgotten her shopping list.
People's Friend
, fish, flour, purple thread, torch batteries (not that anyone would have any), Milk of Magnesia. She stopped by the gates of Firebrand Insurance, and pressed her fist into her breastbone. The route from Pollard Lane to the shops was all uphill, a solid quarter-mile, and she tried to save a bus fare by walking one way, but recently she'd been getting heartburn, and it always caught her just where the hill was steepest. She'd first suffered from it when she was carrying Donald, and the pain and the foul taste in her mouth always made her feel seventeen again.

These days it was caused by worry, unmerited and continual. She waited until the pain had subsided a little and then carried on up the hill. Parma Violets. Writing paper.

She saw Noel before he saw her. He was standing outside the window of the arcade sweetshop, staring at the jar of liquorice laces.

‘Not in school?' she asked, and she had to say it twice more, and add his name, before he turned round stiffly, like a little old man.

‘They're using the church for something else this afternoon,' he said.

‘Which church?'

‘Where we're having lessons. The green one. Made of tin.'

‘That's not a church, that's the Baptist chapel,' said Vee, slightly shocked. ‘Don't you know the difference?'

He shrugged.

‘Well, you can help me with some shopping,' she said, and handed him her basket, before remembering that she was supposed to be cultivating his role as an invalid. She snatched it back and he gaped at her like a bullfrog.

‘Come along then,' she said.

He said nothing in the long queue at the fishmonger, and
nothing at the chemist, even when Mr Harper shuffled forward and offered him a horehound lozenge.

‘Say thank you,' said Vee, nudging him. She mouthed ‘
simple
' at Mr Harper, and then realized that Noel was watching her. She stretched her mouth into a smile. ‘Come along then,' she said.

The stationer's. The hardware shop. The greengrocer. The poulterer. The haberdasher. Last of all, as a little treat for herself, the cosmetic counter at Woolworth's. Vee dithered between two lipsticks of a similar shade, finally plumping for Burnt Sugar. When she turned around, Noel had gone. She spotted him eventually, standing beside the pick-and-mix counter, his face flattened against the glass.

‘D'you want some sweets?' she asked. ‘Choose something, then.'

‘Treacle toffees,' he said.

‘
Please
,' she added.

‘Please.'

She bought him two ounces, and he crammed three toffees into his mouth at once, his whole face working as he tried to chew. People nudged each other as he passed.

Near the bus stop, someone called to Vee, and she looked round to see Mrs Pilcher, wearing a green uniform and standing behind a trestle table piled with saucepans and colanders.

‘We're collecting aluminium. Have you anything to help our brave pilots?' she asked, as if Vee might be hiding a double boiler inside her corsets. ‘Not to worry,' she added, when Vee shook her head, ‘you can give to the Scouts when they call. Or bring them round to me, I'm assembling quite a collection in the back parlour, in fact I think we'll have to start moving them into one of the sheds when you come. Who's the poor little chap?' she added, lowering her voice.

‘An evacuee I've taken in,' said Vee. ‘Thought I'd do my bit.'

Mrs Pilcher nodded approvingly. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Is he Methodist?'

‘I don't know,' said Vee.

There was a sucking noise, as Noel opened his mouth. ‘Atheist,' he said, thickly.

Mrs Pilcher drew in her breath sharply.

‘See you tomorrow, Mrs Pilcher,' said Vee. She took Noel by the arm and steered him twenty yards along the road, before pushing him into the doorway of the ironmonger.

‘What did you say that for?' she asked, giving his shoulder a shake.

He looked at her, silently. A thin thread of brown dribble had escaped from one corner of his mouth.

‘Mrs Pilcher is a lady I work for. You can't say things like that to her. Wipe your mouth.'

He dragged a knuckle across his face.

‘I only got the job with her because we both go to Bethesda. That's chapel, before you ask, and her husband is the minister. The
minister
. Come along.'

She set off walking again, not looking behind her, assuming that the boy would follow.

So tomorrow, then, she could look forward to a morning of lugging saucepans around. Mrs Pilcher's definition of ‘light cleaning' was infinitely elastic. ‘You don't mind, do you, dear Mrs Sedge,' she'd say, revealing some new task better suited to a navvy. What was rich was that at last year's Harvest Supper, the Reverend Pilcher had written New Testament quotes on to strips of greaseproof paper, and Mrs Pilcher had baked them into savoury rolls, and Vee's had been, ‘Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not neither do they spin.'

She had a sudden vision of Mrs Pilcher's expression on hearing the word ‘atheist', and a bubble of laughter rose unbidden in her throat. She swallowed it and looked around. Noel was
plodding twenty yards behind her, his jaw moving slowly. She watched his feet in their good, expensive sandals, and then she frowned.

‘You're not limping,' she said, when he'd caught up.

He wiped his mouth again.

‘I only limp when I'm tired,' he said.

‘Why's that then?'

‘I had polio.'

‘Did you? When?'

‘I don't know. I was a baby.'

‘Do you ever need to see the doctor about it? Or go to the hospital?'

He shook his head, and prised another toffee from the bag, his face still distorted by the ones in his mouth.

They walked side by side to the bus stop.

‘Would it hurt you to talk a bit more?' asked Vee, after the silence had stretched to five minutes. He didn't reply. The bus rounded the corner and Vee stooped to pick up her basket.

She liked a chat. The way things were at home, she usually ended up scrabbling around inside her own head, spooning up thoughts, like the Chinks eating live monkey brains. Donald's father had been a talker, full of fun and jokes, it was why she'd tumbled for him in the first place, though he'd stopped being fun after she'd fallen pregnant. He'd gone and married his boss's daughter, Jenny Fleckney, a girl half a head taller than himself, and now they had four tall daughters of their own. They looked like a circus act when they were out together. Harry Pedder and the Five Giraffes.

‘We get off here,' she said, nudging Noel as the curved roof of Fleckney's Garage came into view. When she'd moved into the flat above the scrap-metal yard it had come as a shock to realize how close it was to Harry's work. For two decades she'd scarcely glimpsed him, and now she saw him nearly every time she got off the bus. He was there now, crouched by a dented
baker's van, a smear of oil across his high forehead. He looked up as she passed, and his gaze bounced off her like an India-rubber ball.

‘Come along,' said Vee to Noel. ‘Finished your toffees?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did no one ever teach you to say thank you?'

‘Thank you.'

‘You might try and sound as if you meant it.' When they got to Pollard Lane, she handed him the basket. She had welts across her fingers from the weight of it.

‘You'll have to write home for wellingtons,' she said, ‘it's like porridge along here when it rains, I spend half my time scraping mud—' and then she heard the motorbike, and she seized Noel by the upper arm and pulled him across the ditch and into the spinney beside the road. He stumbled as he came, and dropped the basket; she heard something break. Ezra Rigg spluttered past, leaning over the handlebars like a racer. Vee waited until the sound had faded, and then she jerked the basket upright. The Milk of Magnesia had smashed all over everything, the coley was filled with glass splinters, the flour ruined, the whole week's egg ration gone in a blink. Her hand reached out and smacked Noel across the face.

His head jerked back but he made no noise.

Half the potatoes had rolled into the litter at the bottom of the ditch. Vee picked out as many as she could find, and found the batteries (thank God) pressed into the mud. ‘What else was in there?' she asked, her voice shrill with guilt.

‘Purple thread. Parma Violets,' said Noel, lips barely moving.

‘Help me find them, then.'

There was a welt on his cheek. She had never hit Donald, not once, not even the time he'd accidentally set the house on fire. When the Parma Violets turned up, under a tangle of ivy, she tore the packet open and gave one to Noel. ‘And a couple for later,' she said. He took them without meeting her eye.

‘That man on the motorcycle,' she said, crossing the ditch and waiting for him to follow, ‘is a rates collector, which means he goes round frightening people, nagging at them, saying they'll go to prison and so on, if they don't pay money that they don't have, and it's a scandal, and he gets paid a good wage by the council for doing it, too, and if you ask me, it's pure wickedness.'

‘My uncle works for the rates,' said Noel.

‘Does he? Well . . .' she groped around for a mollifying statement. ‘There's good and bad all over,' she said, lamely. ‘I expect your uncle's kind to you.'

‘No,' said Noel. ‘I hate him.'

At Croxton's, a lorryload of scrap was being unloaded, and the yard was full of gypsy types. Vee ducked past the office and hurried towards the door of the flat, but Croxton had spotted her.

‘Letter came for you,' he called, and she had to turn back. He held out the envelope and then, as she reached for it, lifted his arm away and left her flailing at air. ‘Hand-delivered,' he said, studying the address. ‘I hope it's not what I think it is, Mrs Sedge. I like to keep on good terms with the council. I like to keep things straight.' He lowered it slowly into her grasp and as he did so there was an enormous metallic crash from the yard, and Vee jumped a foot. Croxton didn't move, just studied her with eyes that were the yellowish grey of bottled whelks.