Opposite the Cross Keys (12 page)

‘Not Maud as well?' I nodded. ‘And she's the one says May Bowden is barmy!' He moved back towards the door. ‘I'd better get that food out of the sun.'

‘Put it on the table,' I directed. ‘Then Mrs Fenner will see it when she comes in.' I went over to my brother and looked up into his face, straining to put into my own all the strength of my feelings. ‘Promise you won't say anything back in St Giles. Promise!'

A little wait, while he thought it over. Then – bliss! – ‘OK. I won't say anything. Am I allowed, though, to tell Maud I saw her sister, and thought I'd never seen such a vision of loveliness in all my born days?'

Mrs Fenner came in. She had been over to Mr Fenner's allotment and she came in with a basinful of peas. Her face was sunburned, and she looked fat without her stays, but firm, not flabby like Ellie, and nice to touch.

She turned the peas out on to the table, and we sat together shelling them into a colander she fetched from the scullery, eating almost as many as we shelled, and throwing the pods back in the basin. It was a lovely beginning, precisely because it didn't seem like a beginning at all, but a continuation of something that had been going on already. Mrs Fenner's only comment on the three cartons of Norwich groceries was, ‘You eat all that, gal, you'll blow up like a balloon.'

‘It's not just for me. It's for all of us.'

‘Oh ah?' Mrs Fenner commented, on a note of mild interest. Then: ‘You sure us lot got the right teeth?'

I saw that we had done something dreadfully wrong. Why hadn't Maud warned us that it was dangerous to give things to people who couldn't give things back?

I managed, choking – what I actually said was that a pea had gone down the wrong way, ‘You don't have to eat it if you don't want to.'

‘Tha's a thought.' Mrs Fenner flashed me a brilliant smile. She didn't seem angry, that was something. ‘You're a clever gal, Sylvie. I'm goin' to learn a lot from you, time you're here, I can see that. Only thing, where we going to stick it, out of the way? That Charlie come in, see anything in a tin, he thinks it grew in the Garden o' Eden. I know!' she exclaimed. ‘We'll put ' em in next door, tha's what we'll do.' She hefted the largest of the cartons in her strong arms.

‘The Harleys', you mean?' I felt confused. The Harleys in the end cottage were very clean, very old, very deaf, very silent. The Fenners didn't have much to do with them. Their son was a butcher in a good way of business who paid their rent and saw they didn't go short of anything.

‘Don't talk daft! They don't need charity no more 'n we do. The other side!'

She levered herself sideways out of the front door, balancing the carton on one generous hip. In a moment I heard a creaking noise: a door being forced open on its rusty hinge. Whilst I waited, frozen to the spot, I could hear Mrs Fenner, through the connecting wall, moving about inside the derelict cottage. I distinguished the sound of the carton being dumped on the floor, jars and tins tinkling prettily.

‘Scared of the ole josser, were you?' Mrs Fenner inquired jovially, re-entering. ‘No cause to be afeard of him, poor ole bugger. Never hurt nobody, alive nor dead.' Hoisting a second carton into position: ‘You don't have to come in there, if you don't want to.'

Miserably I blurted out what was on my mind: the arrangements made with the carrier.

‘Tha's all right, lovey,' was the response. ‘If yer ma wants to send you down something special, tha's different –'

‘No, it isn't!' Unable to put into words that I couldn't stand being treated at Opposite the Cross Keys as if I were a different species, unable to digest the food of the natives, I took refuge in shouting. ‘I'm going straight down to the Post Office and phone Maud up to cancel it!'

Mrs Fenner let her load down for a moment. She looked concerned.

‘Phone? You sure you know how to use it? You be careful, d' you hear? You get one of those electric shocks, Maud'll have something to say. You let that Miss Lethaby get the number for you. Tha's what she's paid for.'

‘All I have to do is ask them to reverse the charges.'

‘I don't know nothing about that. You ask Miss Lethaby. If the ole bitch goes and gets herself electrocuted, tha's her business.' Taking hold of the carton again, she favoured me with that smile of hers which put all right between us. ‘An' don't go an' get yourself run over crossing the road. That won't do me no good wi' Maud either!'

One bonus about sleeping on the sofa was that I couldn't go to bed until everybody else was ready to turn in for the day. After a supper of bread and jam and condensed milk tea, we took our chairs outside to the pavement – all except Mr Fenner, who preferred to stay by the fire reading his
Old Moore's Almanac
– and sat watching the cars and the traps, the carts and the bicycles going home to roost like the rooks still making a great cackle in the beeches at the back of the pond.

Happiness was all round me – something I knew, if I wanted to, I could reach out and feel under my hand. There I sat, secure, watching other people scurrying past, poor things, still seeking what only I, so far, had had the good luck to achieve.

I played games with Tom, counting how many black cars passed by, or how many brown horses. He was better with the horses than with the cars, and with neither if they came to more than ten. I soon learned to call an end to each game before that point was reached. Even Charlie, seemingly quite pleased to see me, joined in a game or two, until one of his pals came by and they went off to the Swan together.

Mrs Fenner warned him, ‘You late, don't you wake up Sylvie.'

How lovely to hear in words that I wasn't to be packed off home at the end of the day!

In the long light of the summer evening I even saw one or two people I knew from Norwich: Mr Martin the butcher, driving his white van with the picture of a bull on one side and a sheep on the other – we were on the sheep side – and Mr Hooper, who cut my father's hair, driving with his wife in his Austin Seven, the first car he had driven in his life. Mr Hooper had told my father that the day before he collected the car from the dealer's, he had gone to St John the Baptist's, the Roman Catholic church at the top of St Giles, and vowed to the Virgin that he would never, so long as he lived, drive above twenty miles an hour. As he came round the bend by the Swan you could tell, by the line of cars bunched up behind him, that he was keeping his promise, and wouldn't need to go to Confession on that account at least.

There were several cars full of young people going the other way – to Cromer, probably, where, in the season, there was almost always a dance on somewhere; on the pier, or in one of the big hotels on the cliffs. As one of the cars went past, its driver went
honk-de-de-honk-honk
on his klaxon, putting the rooks in a frightful tizzy. I thought it must be one of my brother's friends, who had recognized me sitting there outside Opposite the Cross Keys. But it wasn't. Just high spirits and the general joyfulness of the evening.

I did see one young person I knew – coming away from the coast, though, towards Norwich. I could hardly say that she knew me. I knew her because she was beautiful and strange and she had a red Alvis car – you didn't see many red cars in those days – and also because her father was Mr Lee, who taught my father Chinese writing.

Mr Lee was Chinese, but Miss Lee his daughter was half-Chinese and half I don't know what. There didn't seem to be any Mrs Lee. When she went out she sometimes wore cheongsams and sometimes ordinary dresses, but the result was never ordinary whatever she wore. She looked gorgeous, but so fierce! She looked like the dragon on the vase my parents had bought in Mr Lee's curio shop. Her eyebrows were very black and came together in the middle, which was threatening.

I recognized the red Alvis before I recognized her, and I recognized her black eyebrows before I recognized the rest of her. She was driving fast. I wondered what was going to happen when she caught up with the queue behind Mr Hooper. She wouldn't like it one bit, I was sure of that.

We came back indoors at the beginning of dusk – one or two cars, no more, with their sidelights on – to find that, within, it was already night.

Mrs Fenner lit the lamp; a poor way for one who had never done anything to make light except press a switch on a wall to describe the absorbed ritual of preparation: the oil, the wick, the mantel, the shade, elements in an act of communion, as they might be the wafer and the wine. And at last the match, the flame, as on that first day when God said Let there be light: and there was light.

We sat round the table, quiet, bathing in the light as in a benediction. I believe it was done for me, an extravagance and a celebration. Left to themselves, I'm pretty sure, they would have made their preparations for the night, such as they were, in what was left of day, and gone to their beds in the gathering dark.

I was enchanted, but fearful. Mr Fenner had let the fire die down. The merest glimmer of red showed behind the bars. How was I, far from my own darling bed, to face the country night that lay in wait?

Mr Fenner and Ellie were the first to disappear through the door at the side of the fireplace. Their footsteps clumped upstairs, sounded overhead for a little, then silence. Mrs Fenner made up my bed on the sofa, then took me into the scullery, dipped my facecloth into the water bucket and, as if I were a baby, wiped over my face and hands. Nothing was said about washing my teeth, and I didn't like to ask.

In bed, I thought I felt the prickles of the horsehair, but that was probably only because I expected it. Mrs Fenner was very gentle in her jolly way. She tucked me in, and began to tell me stories about her two grandfathers, the old men in the photographs over the sofa who, I could take her word for it, would watch over me through the night. Guardian angels wouldn't do it better.

They were a pair, she asserted. Not on speaking terms, it stood to reason, they were so different. The one with the high collar and the muttonchop whiskers had been on the starchy side, but kind. He used to give her pennies for singing hymns. Once, would you believe it, he knitted her a pair of mittens. He always said no man who knitted would ever strike a fellow being in anger.

Mrs Fenner burst out laughing. Not even the memory of her revered ancestors could restrain her mirth. She was sitting at the end of the sofa, and made it shake as if it too were enjoying the joke.

‘Didn't stop him sticking one of his ruddy needles up some bugger's backside. Never knew what it was about, I was too young, on'y he weren't the sort to bend a good knitting needle out o' true fer nothing!'

And the other one, the one with the dark curls, the goatee and the romantic, not to say moony, air? Don't let it fool you, Mrs Fenner said. He was a one, a gambler and a great one for the women. Always in trouble and always landing on his feet however far he fell. Married a widow with a nice little pub over Attlebridge way. Drunk himself to death, o' course, but did it in a warm bed and on the best liquor money could buy.

Mrs Fenner kissed me a resounding goodnight, and blew out the lamp, leaving me to the care of the two of them.

Years later – I must have been getting on for twelve – I came across pictures of Mrs Fenner's two grandpas in a school history book. The captions underneath said that they were Gladstone and Disraeli.

Shaken to the core, I rushed to Maud. She was sitting at the kitchen table, sewing.

‘Look at that!' I thrust the book under her nose, furious that I had been made a fool of. ‘D' you know who your mother's grandfathers really were? Two Prime Ministers of England!'

Maud never batted an eyelid; went on cobbling up one of my school stockings into the hideous pucker she called a darn. She completed her handiwork and bit off the thread before replying.

‘What about it?' she said then. ‘Yours in't the on'y family wi' brains.'

I must have slept, because I never heard Charlie come home. I was completely unaware that Gyp had left his smelly old rug to heave his ancient carcass on to the blanket covering my legs, though, given his girth and his age, the feat could not have been accomplished without a great to-do of scrabbling and snuffling.

Yet I do not remember sleeping and, once awake, could not imagine that I could ever have slept through the noise which came from the derelict cottage on the other side of the wall.

Despite its awfulness, there is something reassuring about a big noise – a thunderclap, say, an explosion. Whatever else it may be, it is one thing: it happens and is over. A single rat, on the other hand, makes a small noise, something between a squeak and a wheeze; and a colony of rats, an empire of them, still does not add up to a big noise, but to something far worse – to an infinite number of individual noises which do not blend into a whole but remain obstinately apart, each decibel insisting upon its own unique place in the brazen-throated universe. Hearing them, you do not simply screw up your face and think
Rats!
You begin counting the uncountable.

I found out, that first night, that there were rats who wheezed basso and rats who squeaked castrato; rats who played tympani, making their tiny feet drum out Tartar hoof-beats galloping off the steppes and up to the gates of Vienna. The noises sounded extremely bad-tempered, as if rats didn't like rats any more than people did.

By the end of the week – by which time I had learned to sleep through everything they could throw at me – I could have found this apparent absence of love in a rat's life pathetic. As it was, I stood up in my bed, much to the annoyance of Gyp, interrupted in the middle of a snore, and slapped the wall with all my strength.

‘Shut up, do you hear! Stop it!'

The result was a momentary lull before the noises redoubled. I might as well have cried ‘Encore!' Above me, invisible in the darkness, Mrs Fenner's grandpas vibrated to the blow.