Opposite the Cross Keys (2 page)

When I had got myself and bicycle safely across to Opposite the Cross Keys, Ellie stopped combing; raised her bum sufficiently to let her hair drop down to its full length, and resumed her seat, this time sitting on hair and bum together
¹
She said with undisguised satisfaction at disappointing me, ‘Ma's up at Randall's, plucking.'

‘Oh.'

‘Stratton Strawlers, you want to go up there. Reckon she could do with a hand.'

Why don't you go and give her one yourself, then, you lazy mauther
²
I thought but did not say. Ellie knew very well how much I hated plucking, I had proclaimed it often enough. Even so, for the pleasure of Mrs Fenner's company I would gladly have pressed on to Stratton Strawless, another two miles, if only my legs had been that tiny bit longer.

As it was, I suddenly felt at the end of endurance. I leaned bike and myself against the cottage wall and closed my eyes: then opened them again as, out of the corner of one, I became aware of a coloured rag dangling in the heat.

It was then I saw the Union Jack. The four cottages which made up Opposite the Cross Keys were arranged as follows. At either end lived, respectively, the Harleys and the Leaches, the latter in the largest one, at the end of the row furthest away from Norwich. The Fenners' place was next to the Harleys'. In between the Fenners' and the Leaches' was a derelict cottage which was only kept up at all by the support of the dwellings on either side. At one time it must have been some kind of shop, because the ground-floor window was a good deal larger than the mingy little front windows of the other three cottages. The window panes were all gone, however, replaced by flattened petrol cans which, oxidized to purples and peacock blues of a barbaric intensity, lent the frontage an appearance that was distinctly unwelcoming.

There were children in the village who said that the old man – the old josser as everyone called him – who was the last person to live in the ruined cottage had died sitting in his chair in front of the fire, and that he was such a filthy old devil nobody had bothered to fetch him out and get him over the road and into the churchyard, which was why the landlord had never thought to do the place up and rent it out again. The grown-ups said that was ridiculous; but they, no more than the children, ever thought to put a foot to either the front door or the back one – both of them rotting on their hinges – to settle, once and for all, what was the truth of it.

When I stayed with the Fenners, my bed was the old horsehair sofa which was pushed up against the wall dividing their cottage from the derelict one, and at night the noise of the rats on the other side of the partition was horrendous. Gyp the dog, who slept on the opposite side of the room from me, on the rag rug in front of the fire, never so much as stirred in his snuffly sleep except for an occasional exasperated tail-thump when the sound rose to a double-forte, but I found it dreadfully disturbing. What could the rats find to eat in that empty house? I reckoned they must long ago have finished all that was edible of the old josser, so what next if not me, so conveniently to hand? I lay awake straining for the gnawing through lathe and plaster which would mean they were on their way.

When at last I mentioned my fears to Mrs Fenner, she only laughed. Rats were no fools, she said. They knew which side their bread was buttered. If they ran out of grub next door it stood to reason they would start on the further, the Leach side. Mr Leach was something in an office over Catton way and went to work every day in a collar and tie, the stuck-up bor
³
The Royal Family would open their eyes at what Mrs Leach spent at the Co-op every week. Catch rats wasting their time on the Fenners when they could have the freedom of the Leach larder!

Somebody had removed several of the flattened petrol cans from the window of the derelict cottage. There was no breeze to set the Union Jack waving. It hung limply from its stick which rested on the ruined window sill.

In my exhausted state I puzzled the meaning of this sign. Ellie was looking at me with that simpering expression of hers which signified ‘I know something you don't, Miss Clever Dick!' Suddenly, to my astonishment, her purse-faced gaze melted, the little pleats round her mouth opening out like a drawstring bag when the ties are unloosed. With a lumberingly coquettish gesture she rearranged her wrapper over her large breasts as the front door of the derelict cottage opened, and a man came out.

He was a man of medium height, compactly built; wearing black trousers and a waistcoat over a black-and-white shirt without a collar and with its sleeves rolled up to above the elbows. He was powdered all over with what looked like plaster dust, dust which had settled on the hairs of his bare arms, giving them a bloom like the bloom on a peach. On his head he wore a black cap, from under the back of which little black curls stuck out. He needed a haircut and no mistake.

Either the curls were dusty too, or he was going grey. It was hard to tell the age of the brown face in which white teeth flashed under a natty little moustache like John Gilbert's or Ronald Colman's.

He came out of the derelict cottage in a cocky, confident way, holding his arms forward, hands opened out, like one of the Russian Ballet dancers I had been taken to see on my last visit to London; making his entrance and circling the stage as much as to say, ‘Here I am – the one you've been waiting for.
Now
you'll see something!'

The cloth of his clothes was the usual horrid stuff that only the poor wore, and his cap the kind you could see hanging in bunches outside the cheap shops in Magdalen Street, his boots the stiff casings that made you wonder sometimes if the feet of working-class men weren't a different shape from one's father's feet, high-arched and narrow in their polished leather. Frosted with white, he nevertheless looked dirty and unshaven; yet, with it all, possessed of a slim-waisted elegance not to be denied.

His eyes were black and bright with mischief.

‘Hello, 'ello!' he said. ‘You must be that Sylvie gal Ma Fenner's always on about.'

I roused myself out of my terrible fatigue enough to exclaim automatically – the first thing Maud had taught me was that the people low down on the ladder must be accorded their proper respect: it was their only wealth – ‘
Mrs
Fenner!'

‘
Mrs
Fenner!' the man repeated, with a mocking emphasis. ‘She warned me you were a proper little madam.' He came over to where I drooped limply against the wall and, eyes screwed up against the sun, took a closer look at me. He smelled, of course. Everybody at Opposite the Cross Keys smelled; but a new combination I would have to get used to.

‘Too much to suppose Lady Godiva here'd get off her arse an' make you a cup of tea.'

Ellie, who had freed her hair from its durance vile, and gone back to combing it with the unspeakable comb, said, ‘She knows where the kettle's kept.'

‘Bleedin' angel of mercy!' the man exclaimed. Ellie giggled and blushed all over her face. To me he said, ‘Don't go away, darlin'', and slipped back to the derelict cottage, re-emerging a moment later with a wooden crate in one hand and a chipped enamel mug in the other.

The mug, half-full, contained standard Opposite the Cross Keys tea – the cheapest, dustiest leaves, boiled up three times and laced to a revolting sweetness with lashings of condensed milk. Tom Fenner, the elder of Mrs Fenner's sons, who worked for Mr Theobald, the dairy farmer, was allowed a billycan of milk every day as part of his perks; yet never, in all my time at the Fenners', did I see a drop of natural milk pass any lips other than Gyp's and those of a couple of hedgehogs who used to wander into the scullery on summer evenings for a sup out of the dog's bowl.

Back home in St Giles, I would assuredly have thrown up at the mere sight of the contents of that mug, let alone the taste. At Opposite the Cross Keys, perched on an empty orange box, I drank deeply, and was revived. The tea was tepid, a tin spoon still sticking up in it, and I guessed that the man had been engaged in drinking it himself when I had arrived. The mug was so stained there seemed no point in speculating as to whether he and I had, or had not, drunk from the same side.

‘Made it on me Primus,' the man said, as if boasting of the last word in kitchen gadgetry, at the same time explaining a taste of meths in place of the usual sulphur from the Fenners' coal fire, their sole means of heating water, and indeed of all cooking. ‘Plenty for seconds, if yer ladyship feels so disposed.'

‘I wouldn't say no,' Ellie put in, before I could answer one way or the other.

‘Did the wind speak?' the man demanded, looking about him in a merry, exaggerated way.

‘Ellie said she would like a cup of tea,' I supplied helpfully.

‘Ellie can get her own fuckin' cup.' Ellie, her little eyes half-closed, said nothing. She went on dragging the comb through her hair as if playing some musical instrument with a tone range beyond the reach of the human ear. ‘It's you I was asking.'

‘I've had all I want, thank you, Mr –' I hesitated. ‘I don't know your name.'

‘Chicken.'

‘Mr –' Again I hesitated, it sounded so improbable. ‘Chicken.'

‘Not Mr Chicken,' the man corrected. ‘Chicken, as in which came first, the chicken or the egg.'

‘Please – I mean – is Chicken your Christian name or your surname?'

‘Either or neither.'

‘It has to be one or the other!' Names, in my book, were not things to be treated lightly. ‘You have to be either Mr Something Chicken or Mr Chicken Something.'

‘Like Mr Roast Chicken, you mean, or Mr Chicken Soup?'

‘No, of course not! Like –' I improvised wildly. ‘Like Mr Alfred Chicken, for example, or Mr Chicken Jones –'

‘Do I look like an Alfred Chicken or a Chicken Jones? People'd bust their sides laughing!' He stooped over me again. I tried not to flinch at the still unfamiliar smell. ‘Feelin' better, are you?'

I nodded gratefully. I was feeling much better. ‘Have you come to live here in St Awdry's?' I asked.

‘Your guess is as good as mine.' He took hold of my hand. His own was very hard, with splayed fingertips. ‘Come an' see what I bin up to.'

He led me into the derelict cottage, handing me over the shattered door sill with a parody of old world courtesy. Inside, splicing the gloom, white dust sprinkled with red revolved in the sunbeam which came through the pushed-out window panes. The air was thick with plaster and pulverized brick.

What the man had done – what Chicken had done (I reminded myself that I must get used to the ridiculous name which, somehow, once put to use, did not sound so ridiculous after all) – was to pull down the entire wall between the front room and the scullery, making one long, low room.

‘Weren't room enough to swing a fart!' he explained. ‘I can't abide not having a bit o' space about me.' He looked about him with shining eyes. ‘Not bad, eh?'

Flattered by the way Chicken sought my approval – something grown-ups, in my experience, seldom bothered to do – I nodded eagerly. ‘Except the ceiling looks a bit saggy.'

Deprived of the dividing wall, the ceiling looked dangerously saggy. Discreetly, so as not to give offence, I moved from beneath the saggiest part.

Chicken said indifferently, ‘I'll get something to hold that up, when I get round to it.' Looking young and enthusiastic: ‘Jest you wait till I get this muck out, an' you'll see something!'

I remembered the rats and asked what he had done about them.

‘Oh, them! Tied their fuckin' tails together, two at a time, an' showed 'em the door.'

If he'd told me that he had put down poison I'd have thought nothing of it. Poison, in those days, was standard fare for rats as well as for black beetles and the murdered wives who filled the pages of the
News of the World
. But tying their tails –!

‘Oh!' I cried. ‘That's cruel!'

The white teeth flashed in the brown face.

Chicken said, ‘I'm a bad man.'

Out in the air again, I asked the bad man where he had come from.

‘Nosy, aren't you?' was the reply. ‘I don't ask where you come from.'

‘But you know where! Mrs Fenner must have said.'

‘You know where, too. Everywhere that isn't here.'

‘But that means anywhere!'

‘So it do!' A bright, congratulatory smile. ‘What matters is where you are, not where you ain't.'

Chicken's words made me aware with a sudden awful certainty that, on the contrary, where I wasn't at that moment – to wit, on the Hippodrome forecourt, cycling round and round like a good little girl – was of the greatest importance. I hurried over to the cottage wall, took hold of the handlebars and wheeled the bicycle to the edge of the pavement. Even as I did so, I knew there was no way I was going to be able to get the contraption home. My legs had never felt shorter.

Chicken asked, ‘You got that saddle down far as it'll go?' I nodded dumbly. ‘That Maud o' yours must be daft as Ellie here to let you out on the road on that ol' four-poster.'

Ellie scowled. She hated Maud to be classed her equal at anything, even daftness. For me, though, even in my extremity I couldn't bear to hear Maud blamed for my wrongdoing.

‘She didn't let me out! I let myself out! I'm not supposed to go riding till my legs are long enough.' Tears welled up in my eyes.

‘No bawlin'!' the man commanded sharply. ‘An' we'll see if we can't figure out some way to get you home again. There's a bus along in half an hour –'

Trying not to cry: ‘I haven't any money, and they won't take the bike anyhow.'

‘Ferget what it costs. We can always take it out of Ellie's piggy bank, eh, sweetheart?' Ellie gave no indication that she had heard: lifted her bum ponderously and sat down on her hair again. ‘This bloody bedstead can go up wi' the carrier Saturday –'