Opposite the Cross Keys (14 page)

‘Ta, missus.' Nellie Smith crawled out of her hiding place. ‘Thought the old goat had got me to rights that time. Been shitting his britches to do it ever since we come here, I can't think why, when I can read an' write, I bet, well as he can.' Adding ingratiatingly, ‘You got lovely legs, missus.'

‘Tha's right.' Mrs Fenner nodded in grave acknowledgement of the compliment. ‘Tha's what come o' being a bally dancer, up on me toes all hours.' She let out one of her enormous guffaws. ‘Ruddy little liar, like all your kind …' She spoke, for a wonder, with something close to affection: I had never heard her use that tone to a gypsy before. ‘You two hungry? Sylvie knows where the sangwiches are …'

We sat, the two of us, on a bale of straw under the table, eating the onion sandwiches, breathing the smell of them into each other's faces, our eyes watering, the mucus from our noses running into the bread. The straw pricked my legs whilst we ate, and I thought, from now on, whenever I feel straw pricking at my legs, even if it happens when I'm an old, old woman, I'll remember sitting here eating onion sandwiches with Nellie Smith.

She looked admiringly at my scabs and commented, ‘Some buggers have all the luck. I had some o' those, that bloke could stuff his snout up his own backside. Two kids at the camp got scarlet fever. It's a secret, or they'll take them away to Isolation, so you won't tell, will you?' I shook my head fervently. I would not have given them away if it had been the Black Death. ‘Well, I bin sharing a bed wi' one of ' em for a month, but d' you think I caught it? Not on your nelly!'

That was when she told me Nellie Smith was her name, and no, in answer to my query, she hadn't come plucking with her ma, but with Mavis, the one with that red-haired baby as big as a bus.

‘Is Mavis part of your family, then?'

‘No!' Nellie Smith's mouth closed like a trap. I wondered what I'd said wrong. In a minute, however, she began to tell me about her ma, who was up in Yorkshire living on a farm, and who was going to send for her once she'd got the feller she'd gone off with used to the idea.

With no apparent perturbation she told me that they'd all been up to Appleby for the Horse Fair like they always did, and the farmer to whom they'd sold the roan colt had fallen head over heels in love with her ma, which was no surprise, seeing she was a Romany princess, not like that Princess Mary who was only a Gorgio, like any other.

Although I knew from reading the
News of the World
to Mrs Fenner that husbands and wives did not always stay together till death did them part, and that marriages could end in several ways, some of them very nasty, I found it impossible to conceive that my own mother might one day elect to run off with a fellow from Yorkshire or anywhere else; or that, if she did the inconceivable, I would be able to talk about it in the matter-of-fact way in which Nellie Smith spoke of her mother's desertion. She laughed aloud to think what the farmer had paid for the roan colt, the besotted fool. Her dad had cleaned up a packet.

‘Mind you, he were a lovely bit of horseflesh. Wouldn't be surprised if he won the National. I don't mind telling you, I was right sorry to see that colt go.' She finished, ‘Still, what I say is, since ma's living wi' the bloke what bought it, it's still in the family, in a manner of speaking.'

I offered, ‘You'll see it again when your ma sends for you.'

‘Tha's right,' said Nellie Smith, her eyes bleak.

Meantime, it turned out, the gypsy girl was earning all the money she could, saving all the money she could, stealing all the money she could – she said this last with a hard stare as if daring me to make something of it – so that, when the call came from Yorkshire, she'd have the price of the fare, and a bit over.

‘Want to hear somethin' funny? I like school, I actually do. I like all that learning, an' doing tables. On'y you can't get rich sittin' in a school desk, can you? An' then again, I won't be forced. That old pruneface got no business to force me. It's a free country, tha's what my dad says, though he don't say wha's free about it, 'cept his hand always ready with a clout, for nothing. You can't get to Yorkshire free, I know that all right!'

Which brought her back to my scabs, that perfect alibi for non-attendance at school. She asked wistfully, ‘Are you dead sure you aren't still catching?'

‘Dead sure,' I confirmed. ‘But –' a glow spreading through me as the idea took hold – ‘I tell you what –'

My chest, invisible to the outside world, was still spattered with several scabs not yet ready to drop off. In their state of near-ripeness, I was pretty sure, it shouldn't be too difficult to prise them from their moorings. And I had brought my glue with me to St Awdry's in case the ones on my face fell off betimes.

‘Would you do that?' Nellie Smith cried, when I had unfolded my plan. ‘Would you reely do that for me?'

‘Yes.' I could hardly speak, so choked was I with the happiness of cementing – or rather, gluing – my friendship with this marvellous girl. ‘It's nothing, really.'

By the time the working day was over, the sun still scorching the sky, we were, all of us, grey all over, our throats so coated we could only croak. The bottle of cold tea, the juicy onion rings, had become a tantalizing memory.

I don't know how much they paid Mrs Fenner for her nine hours of unremitting labour, but she seemed satisfied. The gypsies, to the manifest pleasure of the foreman and his assistants, picked up their skirts then and there, and stowed their pay away in their drawers or their petticoats. I was given fourpence and a pat on the head for my pains, which seemed to me such monstrous injustice that I burst out without thinking, ‘Is that all?'

Whilst the other workers stared in admiration, I was given an extra tuppence and a chuck under the chin – I have said I was a fetching child. When, on the way back down the loke, I asked Nellie Smith how much she'd got, she opened a tightly closed fist and disclosed three sixpences.

‘One they gi' me. Two I took.'

‘You didn't!'

‘Knocked over one of them little piles on the table accidental, an' then helped stack ' em up again, like the little lady I am. I'd 'a got more if it hadn't bin for that fucking foreman watching me like a cat watching a mousehole.'

‘I wish I'd thought of that.'

Nellie Smith paused in mid-stride and looked me over reflectively. ‘Nah,' she pronounced at last. ‘You don't reely. You ain't the type. Give the game away just looking at you.' She asked conversationally, ‘Your ma or pa ever swipe anything?'

‘I – I shouldn't think so.'

‘There you are then!' Nellie Smith spoke with a touch of patronage; even of pity. ‘You can't go agin nature. It's got to be in the blood. Someone like you might as well give up afore you start.'

We arranged to meet, after tea, behind the ruined pigsties which were a little along the road from the gypsy encampment. Nellie dismissed my invitation to come to Opposite the Cross Keys as if I were a bloody fool to suggest such a thing. I soon learned that the gypsy girl had an instinctive distrust of any house which was not on wheels; and wondered how she would make out on that Yorkshire farm where the Romany princess awaited the coming of her daughter.

I suggested, carefully casual – I'd have given anything to see the inside of a real gypsy caravan, ‘I don't mind coming over to your place, if you'd rather.'

‘Don't talk daft!' was her answer which, perhaps because I was tired (for I had, of course, known all along what her reply would be), had me sulking all the long walk back from Stratton Strawless, through Salham Norgate and beyond.

As we neared the encampment a red sports car nosed out of the entrance. A large man with a black felt hat pushed back on his bushy red hair, his collarless shirt unbuttoned and stomach hanging over a wide leather belt worn well down on the hips, stood on the steps of what turned out to be Nellie Smith's caravan. Otherwise there was only an old woman about, sitting on a stool outside a caravan which was painted a dark green and looked like an outsize barrel. Further back, some naked children played with a piece of wood, and a woman bent over something that steamed in a big black pot hung on a tripod over hot ashes.

Before Miss Lee drove her car over the grass verge, she twisted round in the driving seat, looked back at the red-haired man and waved. The man raised a lazy hand in acknowledgement, and in another second the car was out on the road back to Norwich, disappearing pertly round the next bend.

As it vanished from sight my pent-up spleen exploded.

‘You let
her
into the camp!' Then I looked at Nellie Smith's face and was sorry I had spoken.

‘That bleeding Chink!'

I was really too tired to go out again after tea, but I had promised. Mrs Fenner and Ellie sat outside on the pavement, enjoying the cool of the day. For once, Mrs Fenner had borrowed Ellie's comb and was using it to get the chicken bits out of her own hair. I had never seen her hair down before; not so long as Ellie's, and touched with grey, but soft and springy in texture, the way hair ought to be, not like Ellie's dank spaghetti. For the first time I realized that Mrs Fenner wasn't old at all, younger than her daughters in her warmth and vitality.

I said that it had been a lovely day.

‘Lovely!' She stopped combing and burst out laughing. ‘Some people have a funny idea of lovely! I reckon your ma'd have the Prevention of Cruelty on to me if she knew where I had you today. An' as fer Maud –'

‘I won't tell, I promise.'

‘I know that.' She spoke without laughter now; with a purity of trust that made the evening sparkle like a crystal, every outline precise and perfect. ‘Otherwise I wouldn't 've done it.' Looking at me critically: ‘You could do with a bit of a comb yourself.'

I backed away from the fearsome object which could only, I felt sure, make my hair filthier than it was already. I could feel the jar of glue which I had concealed in my knickers oozing some of its contents on to my thigh through the slit in its rubber cap.

‘I shan't be long.'

‘Off to play wi' that little gypsy gal? She's all there, that one. But you mind out. Keep yer eyes peeled. You know what gypsies do wi' little children. Kidnap 'em – take ' em away an' nobody ever hears of them again.' The familiar laugh broke out again, rocked the chair on the uneven ground. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish, eh? No such luck!'

‘No such luck,' I assented, smiling.

Nellie Smith was waiting for me. She was sitting on an upturned pig trough moodily munching on a stalk which she spat out when she saw me coming.

‘You took your time.'

‘I had to have my tea first.'

‘Oh ah? What did you have?' She might have been a zoologist inquiring into the eating habits of some strange animal.

‘Sardines.' Going over to the offensive myself: ‘What about you?'

‘Stew. Hedgehog an' squirrel.'

‘You didn't!'

‘Want me to go an' fetch you some?'

‘No thank you.' We stared at each other in hopeless silence. We might have been Jew and Gentile, divided by the unbridgeable chasm of kashrut. Then, with a sudden change to a quicksilver charm which was irresistible, Nellie Smith demanded, ‘Did you bring what you said you would?' and when I fished the leaking glue out of my knicker leg, she exclaimed, eyes dancing, ‘You're a ruddy angel!'

I had to take my dress off to get at the scabs which were left on my chest. As I stood there in my vest and knickers, by the decaying sties filled with nettles, I felt very peculiar, almost religious. The sun was going down, orange and slow. The place still smelled of pig manure, but old and dry, not unpleasant: spicy, like incense.

The scabs were not as ripe for picking as I had thought. They clung to my skin like shipwrecked mariners to a floating spar. Each left behind a red oval which I had been warned, I don't know how many times, by both my mother and Maud, meant a scar, a lessening of my beauty for which I would grieve all my days. (They spoke truly, except for the grieving bit. The scars are still there.)

I offered up my scabs willingly, glad to have them in my gift. I stuck them on to Nellie Smith's face with dabs of glue, a mystic union of her flesh and mine. I placed two in the centre of her forehead, one either side of her nose, one in the middle of her little pointed chin. I only had an odd number left, so one cheek had to have four scabs and the other three, which perhaps was as well: too great a symmetry might have aroused suspicions.

When I had done, Nellie Smith looked wonderful. No truant officer would have let so much as her shadow fall across the school door.

She danced about in excitement.

‘How do I look? Han't you got a bloody mirror?'

I hadn't, and she was so eager to see what she looked like that she hardly stopped to say ta before running off home to her caravan to look in the glass. Left alone, I scrambled back into my dress, thrust the jar of glue back into my knickers, and went back to the road. The sun was behind the trees, but the sky was still bright – richly purple below, with, higher up, fluffy white clouds gilded at the edges, looking as if they too had been stuck on with glue, only by a more practised hand.

I got home so dazed with tiredness I couldn't stand straight, and Mrs Fenner made up my bed on the sofa even though Mr Fenner was still eating his tea, reading his
Old Moore's Almanac
between mouthfuls. I washed neither my dirty hair nor my dirty body. My chest felt sore, a soreness I treasured, though I was too tired to remember why. I think, that night, the rats in the derelict cottage next door must have gone to bed early too. At any rate, I never heard a peep out of them.

1. loke: Norfolk for lane or narrow alley
   

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