Opposite the Cross Keys (16 page)

‘Hushabye, Baby, on the tree top.
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock –'

The piercing voice of Nellie Smith obliterated my insect world. I sat up, glad that she should choose to seek me out: sorry to call an end to my mindless reverie.

‘I wasn't asleep. I was reading.'

‘Oh ah.'

Nellie Smith was sitting astride the churchyard wall, one leg out of sight as if she hesitated to commit herself to God's Acre in her entirety. She looked quite ill with her enormous eyes, the scabs on her sallow face rimmed with glue that looked like pus.

‘Your chickenpox looks fine,' I said, to remind her of her obligations. I hadn't liked the sound of that ‘Oh ah.'

Nellie Smith grinned hugely and at once looked healthy.

‘Don't I just! Mavis nearly had a fit. Made me sleep in the old un's caravan, case I give it to the kid.'

‘You mean you didn't tell her it was only pretend?'

‘I never tell
her
anything.'

‘Who's the old un?'

‘You seen 'er. Smokes a pipe.' The girl leaned towards me and nearly lost her balance. ‘Been talking to your missus. She told me you're goin' over to the White House tomorrow, spud-grubbing.'

‘She did mention something.' Unable to hide my curiosity: ‘Did you actually go indoors to speak to her?'

‘What you think?' – contemptuous that I should even ask. ‘That barrel o' lard what's always sitting outside combing her hair, she were there an' I asked her was the missus home. Gives me the creeps,' Nellie Smith asserted cheerfully. ‘Anyways, your missus must 've heard me, an' she come out. When she said yes, you two was goin' spudding, I arst could I come with, an' she said I could.'

‘Why? Aren't any of the gypsies going?'

‘Wednesday. Market Day. They're all off to Norwich.'

‘It isn't much of a market Wednesdays. Nothing like Saturdays.'

‘They still reckon they'll get more there for less work than grubbin' about on their hands an' knees, spoiling their beautiful white hands.'

‘What'll they do in Norwich?'

Nellie Smith made a face and began in a high-pitched monotone:
‘Buy a bit o' white heather, dearie! Buy yer luck an'yer love an' yer money!'
The voice deepening, incorporating into its obsequious whine a note of menace, though the words, remained innocuous enough:
‘Bit o' silver fer a bit o' white heather! Bit o' silver fer a life o' luck!'
Nellie Smith preened herself as best she could on her precarious perch. ‘I could do it as well as any on 'em,
an
' get more, on'y the constabulary'd be on to me like a ton o' bricks. Kids isn't supposed to work –' the words were coated with an ironic humour beyond her years – ‘which means I can go an' break me back in them bloody spud fields an' nobody says a word because it's just a dear little kiddy havin' a game picking up them pretty pertatoes.'

‘Why don't you come down off that wall? It's lovely down here in the grass. I'll read you some of my book, if you like.'

‘I can read my own bloody book, ta,' was the girl's gracious response. ‘An' gypsies don't ever go into cemeteries. It's bad luck.'

‘They have to go when they're dead.'

Nellie Smith looked down on me, her eyes curiously opaque.

‘So you say.'

I persisted: ‘They have to be buried like everyone else.'

‘What you know about it?' Nellie Smith's gaze swept the churchyard and came to rest on the most imposing monument there, a marble plinth on which an overweight angel cradled a young soldier, dead or sleeping, in one arm, the other raised in an imperious gesture as if to summon a taxicab or, maybe, a chauffeur-driven chariot of fire. ‘If I
had
to be buried in some bloody place like this I'd have an angel like that put over me. What you reckon that one cost to buy?'

I had no idea, and said so. The question surprised me, the one that came next even more so.

‘I bin meaning to ask. You know St Awdry's. You know where there's a spring somewhere round here?'

‘A spring?' I repeated stupidly. ‘What kind of spring?'

‘Not one to put in me mattress, dummy! Wet, like you!'

Her mockery hurting me, I shut my book, picked it up, and went over to the wall, close enough to her leg, bare beneath the grown-up dress, to see the scratches and scars which decorated it from calf to ankle.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I do know where there's a spring, only I can't tell you. It's a secret.'

My secret and Tom's.

One Sunday, earlier in the same year – it must have been late February or early March – as soon as the Morris Oxford with my mother and father and Alfred had disappeared round the bend by the Swan, Tom had taken me by the hand, his other one tapping his lips to stress the importance of secrecy, and whispered that he had something to show me, something that – he had no words to describe it: the glory in his face did it for him.

Hand in hand, though I had been indoctrinated to walk along the main road always in single file for safety's sake, we walked a long way, past Stratton Strawless, almost as far as the turn-off to Hevingham. To be truthful, safety was not the only reason I should have preferred not to walk hand in hand with Tom. His hands were the only thing about him which made me uneasy. They were very large, with a lot of bristly fair hair on the backs of the fingers. They were also soft, almost mushy. When we walked hand in hand my small child's hand disappeared into his large one as into dough that was yielding but astonishingly adhesive. His were hands that not so much held your own as absorbed them; so that, when at last you got them back, it almost seemed necessary to count the fingers to make sure they were still all there.

Once we left the road my discomfort was at an end. The path through the wood was narrow, invaded by outstretching trees. Tom went ahead, chivalrous at no matter what cost in tears to his old army greatcoat, to bend brambles out of my way, lift drooping branches so that I could pass beneath.

I asked no question as to our destination, content to enjoy the entertainment along the way – the woods ready to haze with green, the snowdrops and celandines, the fresh tips to the bottle brushes of pine. Water dripped from every surface, a lively, bejewelled wet; bedewed the cushions of moss which dotted the path like vegetable hedgehogs. All this we passed by until we came out into a clearing, a glade, perfectly circular, where the soft bubble of water was the sound of silence.

An incomparable place.

Tom stopped and demanded, in that thick voice of his which set no boundaries between vowel and consonant: ‘What you say to that, then?'

At first I thought the glade itself was what we had come to see, but then I followed the direction of his pointing forefinger and saw it – water gently lifting itself out of a small bank and flowing away along a sunken track between violet leaves.

A spring.

‘It never stop!' Tom exclaimed in tones of wonder. ‘I bin here watching sunrise to dark an' it never bloody stop!'

He bent over and let the newborn water fill his cupped hands which he raised carefully to my face so that I could partake of the precious libation.

Suddenly, I didn't know why – I still don't know why unless it be that an instinctive knowledge is built into infant ignorance – I felt afraid. I felt afraid of Tom, of that imprecise heaviness of jaw which was not like other people's; of those enormous, mushy hands carefully cradling the water. I drank because there was no choice, but I quivered with fear.

Tom came close, too close.

‘Want to see another secret?'

‘Not now,' I managed. ‘Another secret, another time.'

The big man assented cheerfully enough.

‘Another time!' He thrust a boot into the spring, trying to stem the flow. The water welled up all round the mud-caked sole. ‘See that! It
will
come! Do what you like, it
will
come!' Hooting as at a great joke: ‘Know what they say? They say water like that's what makes a river. Tha's what they say!'

We laughed together at the absurdity of the suggestion that this peerless crystal could bear any relation to the Sal, the drab little stream which grizzled across the suburbs of St Awdry's, or the Wensum, which slithered through Norwich like a dirty old snake. We laughed and I forgot what I had been frightened about.

‘You won't tell anyone?' Tom asked anxiously. ‘They could come an' take it away if they knew it was here.'

I promised.

When we came out on to the road again on the way back, I took Tom's hand without his asking, and we walked back to the village as we had come. I didn't enjoy holding his hand coming back any more than I had going. But it seemed a small enough price to pay for that hateful, unbidden moment of distrust, a small return for the gift of such a secret.

‘It's a secret,' I said again.

Nellie Smith treated this as a statement of no importance. She shifted her position on the churchyard wall as an expression of impatience. ‘What if it is? I'm yer friend, ain't I?'

I hoped she was, I desperately wanted her to be: but I nevertheless felt constrained to point out once more that I had promised not to tell.

‘Promised!' the girl returned contemptuously. ‘Promises are made to be broken.'

Are they, I wondered confusedly; and, fine friend you'd turn out to be, if that's what you think. But I still, more than anything else, wanted her to be my friend, on any terms.

‘Tell you what I'll do,' I proferred, happy to have glimpsed a possibility of compromise. ‘I'll ask Mrs Fenner for a jam jar and I'll go myself and bring you back a jar. A bucketful, if you want.'

‘Huh! Prob'ly go an' fill it up at the pump an' say it's the real thing.'

‘I wouldn't do that!' No promises, no trust either, it seemed. ‘What d'you want spring water for, anyway?'

‘Tha's my business!' Relenting: ‘Something the old un said, tha's all.'

‘What did she say?'

‘Anyone ever tell you you're the world's prize nosy parker?' Nellie Smith leaned forward and gave me a hard look, eye to eye until I felt obliged to look away. ‘Ought to know it were bloody daft to hitch up wi' a sodding Gorgio!'

She swung her leg back over the wall, and slid down on the further side, out of sight. One of the frills on her awful dress came off with a rip, caught on a protruding flint. Nellie Smith did not come back for it.

I looked up at the frill for a moment, then reached up and tugged it from its mooring. It split into two longitudinally, one section in my hand, the other still on the wall, where I left it.

I picked up
Holiday House
and started back to the church gate, wondering what I was going to do with the strip of rag. Return it to its owner? Chuck it on the fire at Opposite the Cross Keys?

In the event – with no idea of what triggered my decision – I made a detour to the monument with the angel on it, scrambled up the plinth at some expenditure of skin, clambered over the soldier, and tied the frayed remnant to the angel's summoning arm. Suddenly afraid that the rector might catch me and misunderstand my motives, whatever they might be, I descended with less solicitude for the sleeping hero than I had shown on the ascent, got myself out of the churchyard with all haste, and ran home.

Mrs Fenner was sitting at the living-room table, peeling potatoes on to a sheet of the
News of the World
, and popping them, as done, into the saucepan already steaming on the fire and emitting a smell that might have been meat or fish, or, again, neither. It was proof of my acclimatization to the Fenner
cuisine
that the aroma, of whatever it was, made my mouth water.

The room was doubly dim after the glare outside, cool despite the fire. I went up to Mrs Fenner and kissed her.

‘
Now
what you bin up to?' she inquired, eyes twinkling.

‘I haven't been up to anything.'

‘Oh ah.' Mrs Fenner gave me a keen look. ‘Feeling a bit homesick, are you, for yer ma an' pa? On'y natural.'

I was fly enough to know that, flattering as it might be to Mrs Fenner's ego, it was not the done thing to admit the truth, which was that I had not had more than a fleeting thought to spare for the St Giles establishment from the moment Alfred had deposited me at Opposite the Cross Keys' door. For the sake of appearances, then, I produced a piteous sniff, and whimpered, ‘A bit.'

‘I got somethin' to cheer you up. That Nellie Smith's coming wi' us termorrow, spud-lifting. You'll like that.'

‘She told me.'

‘Ah! I told her you was over the road, having a quiet read. Did she tell you about what she calls her scheme?'

I shook my head.

‘She's a bright one, I give her that. Must've got it from her ma, can't be that bloody Irish tinker of her pa. Had the cheek to charge me fourpence, when they was here last year, to put a bit o' solder on my kettle, an' two days later, what you think, the bloody spout dropped off. He show his mug round here, he'll hear something!'

‘Irish tinker? You mean, he isn't a gypsy at all?'

‘He's as much a gypsy as I'm the Queen o' Sheba! Her ma, now – her ma were the genuine article, poor sod, for what that's worth.'

‘She's a Romany princess,' I said, proud of my vicarious association with royalty.

‘You don't say!' Mrs Fenner sounded amused. ‘Didn't look much o' one the day she fell down in front of the Post Office an' the ambulance come an' took her to the Norfolk an' Norwich. Blood everywhere – from her nose, her mouth, I don't know where else. You wouldn't think such a bag o' bones could have that much blood in her. Lasted a couple of weeks, so I heard.'

‘Oh, that must be another Mrs Smith,' I asserted confidently. ‘Nellie Smith's ma's run off with a rich farmer in Yorkshire. She's going to send for Nellie as soon as she gets him used to the idea.'