Opposite the Cross Keys (20 page)

How I wished, when the occasion called for it, that the spring water might work in reverse – instead of separating lovers, bring them together! Maud had come down to St Awdry's the Sunday before looking very down in the mouth. That is, to the uninitiated eye she looked the same as usual, except for her wart, which I knew to be an infallible barometer of her inmost feelings. When Maud was in her usual humour it sat pat on the ridge of her nose; but when she was melancholy it flopped sideways, limp as a wind sock when there wasn't any wind. The Sunday before, it had flopped all over the place.

I did not have to ask the cause because I knew it already. Just as I had had a hand in the banishment of Miss Lee, so – though in that case not deliberately – was I in part responsible for the collapse of the most recent of Maud's affairs of the heart.

The latest object of her affections was a young man named Eric, who was some kind of distant cousin of the Fenners'; an awful weed, I thought, but glamorous at twenty paces because he was a soldier. Maud and I used to wait for him outside Wellington Barracks, at the end of Riverside Road: and when he came along, stepping smartly out of the gate in his dress uniform of red tunic, blue trousers and hat with a white band and a shiny peak, he looked marvellous – until he was close enough for you to see his stupid face, which bore a marked family resemblance to Ellie's.

Maud, as always, came provided with Woodbines and packets of slab chocolate – gifts which he grabbed with scant grace. Though she coloured prettily at sight of him, even to my partial eye she looked, in her frumpish costume and hat, more like his maiden aunt than his girl friend; and Eric, for his part, always did his best to hurry her away from the Barracks, up the road towards Mousehold Heath, as if he did not want his mates to see whom he was walking out with.

Eric wasn't very nice to me, either, which irked me, for I was comfortable in my role of little charmer. Looking back, though, I realize that the surprising thing was that Maud – as she did with all her beaux – took me along at all. Was I her ultimate insurance against what might otherwise befall up the road, in some secret hollow of the Heath, where the spicy smell of the gorse and the heather, titillating the senses beyond bearing, might seduce even a virtuous young woman with a wart on her nose into forgetting in a moment of madness that marriage or nothing was what she held firmly in mind?

A little before I came down with chickenpox my father had brought home a kite from his weekly lesson with Mr Lee: a Chinese paper kite, shaped like a bird such as had never flown on land or sea, a bird with a scaly neck and a cruel, imperious head crowned with jewels made out of coloured tinfoil which flashed in the sun. My mother had wanted to hang it up on the wall as a decoration, it was so beautiful and so frail, but my father had insisted that if Chinese children could fly such kites, so, surely, could I.

As it happened, I had not, to date, had much success even with the English variety; and for days I waited impatiently for either my father or Alfred to find the time to come Chinese kite-flying with me, both to provide assistance and, if necessary, to be there to take the blame if the fabulous bird, for its own inscrutable, Oriental reasons, refused to take to the air.

In Norwich the place
par excellence
for kite-flying was a knife-edged excrescence called St James's Hill which, as it happened, was just across the road from the Barracks. All the same, and even besotted by love, it was rash of Maud to assert so confidently, ‘Eric'll fly it for you.'

Whilst I lacked her trust in the youth, I was seized with desire to see my Chinese kite soaring into the English empyrean. I could not bear to wait a moment longer. After all, I reassured myself, if a soldier trained to guard the British Empire couldn't fly a simple thing like a kite, who could?

‘Wha's that, then?' Eric asked in his surly way, when he came out of the Barracks. Even he, stupid as he was, must have seen very well that it couldn't possibly be anything but a kite.

‘A kite,' I answered nevertheless, putting on my winsome smile. ‘Maud said you'd help me fly it.'

Eric looked more human than I had ever known him.

‘A kite!' he echoed, rosy with pleasure. ‘A ruddy kite!'

The wedge-shaped end of St James's Hill was sandy and of gentler gradient than its slippery, grass-covered sides. The three of us toiled up it to the top, aglow with anticipation. Though I balked at letting him carry the kite, I decided that Eric was not so mouldy after all.

At the top of the hill a brisk breeze was blowing. It was agreed that Maud, being taller than I, would hold the bird up ready for the take-off whilst Eric, taking charge of the reel, tweaked it into the air. When it was safely up and away he would hand over to me and I could carry on from there, flying my kite.

It was a sensible arrangement, yet I passed over the bird and the reel with foreboding. The two of them, it seemed to me, giggling and nudging each other in the soppy way of lovers, lacked the
gravitas
which marked out the dedicated kite-flyer. Still, the plan worked. The bird swooped upward as if it couldn't wait to get airborne, and hung there, so magnificent with its spread wings and flashing jewels that we all three cried out, ‘Ah!' involuntarily, the way one does when rockets burst into stars at a fireworks display.

Unfortunately for us, there was one other spectator, equally transported. A dog, a pure-bred mongrel the size of a donkey and of roughly the same coat and colour, had come bounding up the slope to see what we were up to. Still a puppy for all its dimensions, it was, I reckon, already old enough to have discovered that its size was a barrier to social acceptance because it did not approach us directly, but lay down a little further along the ridge, nose between paws, following our every movement with absorbed attention.

When the Chinese bird flew, however, it was too much. I cannot, of course, profess to know what the dog had in mind. I can only guess that, colour-blind as dogs are stated to be, this was nevertheless a dog with an aesthetic sense who, sighting an object of such beauty overhead, reached for it as a child might stretch out its tiny hand to grasp a bright bauble, instinctively.

Except that, being a dog, and a donkey-sized dog at that, it was no tiny hand. Suddenly, with a throaty roar, the animal took an almighty leap, all four feet off the ground as it reached for the swaying loveliness intolerably out of reach.

The details of what happened next are entangled in my memory like the kite cord itself. In a matter of moments the dog and Eric, conjoined in yards of cord, the Chinese bird plummeting out of the sky to land on top of them, rolled over twice on the narrow path which ran along the top of the ridge, and disappeared from sight over the edge.

Maud screamed. I think, though I can't be sure, that she screamed, not ‘Eric!' but ‘The kite!' We ran to the easy way down, and then round the base of the hill to where we found Eric sitting up and furious, and the dog biting pieces out of the remains of the paper bird with the tentative air of a wine taster trying out an unknown vintage. Both man and dog, though now separate entities once more, were bound about by odds and ends of kite cord, long strands of which festooned the hillside in a most untidy way.

‘Look at that, will yer!' Eric shouted at sight of us, pointing to the grass stains on his red tunic and white webbing belt. I went and retrieved his cap from some distance off. It was a sorry sight.

‘Look at that!' Eric sounded beside himself. I no longer thought he wasn't so mouldy. He was mouldy in the extreme. ‘They'll dock me for that! Christ knows what they'll dock me! You an' yer fucking kite!'

Had he cracked his skull or broken a leg I am sure Maud would have fallen upon his breast with loving lamentations. As it was, she said coldly, ‘None of your bad language in front of the child,
if
you please!'

Eric rounded on her.

‘You! You stupid old fart!'

Maud reddened, but said nothing. She fumbled in her handbag, bringing out an envelope which I recognized as one of those into which, with a delicacy appreciated by both, my mother always put her weekly ten shilling note. Maud handed it to Eric with a sniff.

‘Tha's for paying back the Army to get you clean. Tell 'em to wash your mouth out while they're about it.' She snapped the bag shut and took me by the hand. ‘Come on, Sylvie. Nex' time we got a kite to fly, we'll make sure to pick a gentleman.'

We walked back to the tram terminus, both of us, I think, more exhilarated than sad.
This was life!
The dog followed a little behind and tried to get on the tram with us. I wouldn't have minded taking it home if the conductor had allowed it on, but Maud snapped, ‘Don't be daft!' and the world, like the tram presently, began to run on its accustomed rails again.

When Maud turned up at St Awdry's looking out of sorts, I knew she must be grieving, not that mouldy Eric was out of her life, but that, weeks after, she still had not found anybody to replace him.

‘Never mind,' I whispered, when I got the chance. None of the Fenners seemed to have noticed that anything was the matter; or if they had, hadn't said. ‘When I get back to St Giles we'll take a nice walk to the cemetery, like we always do. That will make you feel better.'

She made no reply, but gave me a hug that, even though I couldn't see anything morally against killing two birds with one stone, made me feel a bit guilty. I hadn't mentioned anything about wanting to go to the cemetery on my own account – to wit, to see for myself the grave of Mrs Smith, the gypsy princess.

After a while we took our feet out of the stream and let them dry in the sun. Nellie Smith's legs were longer than mine, but her feet were smaller, high-arched: the right kind for a princess's daughter. Her face, still bruised, still scabbed with my chickenpox, looked less patrician, her black curls positively nihilistic. But her feet were beautiful. The sight of them made me feel emotional. I hated to see them vanish into the boots, several sizes too large, into which she usually poked them.

We were having a day off, well earned. Day after day, accompanying Mrs Fenner to the dusty fields, we had lifted potatoes, and more potatoes and more potatoes, until we none of us wanted to see a potato again. Working the Nellie Smith system we had done well for ourselves financially. Mrs Fenner was quite beside herself: she had never brought home so much money in her life. Most of my share was passed on to Nellie – no act of charity but a pleasurable self-indulgence.

That's for the angel's toes,
I would say to myself, handing over the silver, keeping only the coppers back for myself.
That's for his insteps and his heels. Now I'm up to his ankles
… and so on.

Drugged with the heat, we slouched along Swan Lane, came out on to the main road by the pub. Across the way, the reeds round the pond had begun to set up a clatter, a warning tattoo drummed by a nasty little wind which brought no refreshment of the heavy air. A bank of cloud had appeared from nowhere, shutting off the sun. The rooks in the beeches had fallen silent.

The first drops of rain began to fall as we neared the smithy. By the time we reached Opposite the Cross Keys the skies were teeming. We were soaked.

‘Mrs Fenner's gone to Horsford with Ellie, to the dentist.' I panted out the implicit invitation: but Nellie Smith still refused to enter. She stayed outside the front door, inadequately sheltered by its apology for a porch, her muslin dress moulded against her body, the curls on her forehead channelling rivulets to her nose and cheeks.

‘Come inside!' I coaxed, safely under cover myself. ‘I won't tell anybody.'

Nellie Smith shook her head; only at that moment the world rocked with thunder. Almost simultaneously, lightning cleft the sky and the girl came rushing in, stumbling over the door sill, angry with the elements and with her own fear of them.

Angry with me as well, for having witnessed her weakness, an anger which she took out in spiteful denigration of the room which, she well knew, had become the sweet, still centre of my universe.

‘Cripes!' she exclaimed. ‘What a ruddy dump!'

The fact that I could see Opposite the Cross Keys through her eyes as, at the beginning of my stay, I had seen it through Alfred's – the shabbiness, the dirt, the chest of drawers one foot short, the sooty swag above a fire banked up with coal dust: the smell of sulphur, of Gyp, of absent, unwashed Fenners – in no way lessened my resentment. It was not polite, it was not friendly, to run down other people's heavens.

Nellie Smith circled the room warily, as if afraid of contagion. I sat on the horsehair sofa watching her: thinking how much easier it was to hate a friend than an enemy.

I burst out bitterly, ‘I wouldn't go on like that about your caravan, whatever I thought.'

My depth of feeling did not touch her in the slightest. ‘Our caravan, lemme tell you, 's a blooming Buckingham Palace compared to this hole.' She made a face at the baskets of roses and lilacs on the wallpaper, the trellis and songbirds clinging perilously to the walls, then concentrated her attention on the door at the side of the fireplace. ‘Wha's that, then? A cupboard?'

‘It's the way upstairs.' At the sight of her fingering the latch: ‘You can't go up there! It's private!'

‘Private?' As a caravan dweller, Nellie Smith seemed genuinely puzzled by the word. ‘
You
sleep up there, don't you?'

‘Private to the Fenners. I sleep down here on the couch.'

‘So what if you do? It don't mean you can't go up. Or did they tell you not to?'

I hesitated.

‘Not exactly. I just know I mustn't.'

‘Cracked!' pronounced Nellie Smith. ‘Anyway, tha's you. Nobody said nothin' to me.'

She swung the door open, more open than I had ever seen the Fenners open it. I ran across the room and tried to wrest the latch from her, shut the door up again.