Opposite the Cross Keys (21 page)

‘You're not to go up there! You mustn't!'

Nellie Smith grinned at me without letting go.

‘Bet you're dying to know what it's like yourself.' The degree of truth in this made it all the more important that the Fenners' privacy remain inviolate. ‘What you think they keep up there, then? Dead bodies?' She went up a stair or two, me hanging on to her skirt. ‘Stinks enough.'

Voice, body, trembling, I got out, ‘If you got up there, I'll never speak to you again!'

‘What a bloody take-on about nothing!' Nellie Smith remarked brightly; twitched her dress out of my hand and ran up the stairs.

Was it? – a bloody take-on about nothing, I mean. At the time it didn't seem so. It doesn't seem so now, sometimes. At other times, dependent on my mood, I wonder if it wasn't a poor excuse for breaking up a friendship.

Because I kept my word. I did. I never spoke to the gypsy girl again. When she came back downstairs, black eyes sparkling, and insisted on telling me what it was like on the upper floor of Opposite the Cross Keys, I stuck my fingers into my ears and refused to listen. At this she got so annoyed that she tried to prise my fingers away, and because she was stronger than I, succeeded.

She held my hands in her own, rough and brown, and began afresh. I could no longer close my ears, so I closed my mind. I shut myself off from Salham St Awdry and from everything to do with it. I thought myself back in St Giles, with my father and mother and Alfred, and Maud and Mrs Hewitt and May Bowden and Pillow the toad: even with mouldy Eric. With my patchwork quilt and the beautiful little jar in which my father kept his brushes for doing Chinese writing. With playing ‘Oh will you wash my father's shirt' on the black notes of the piano, crossing over hands for the second part, like a proper virtuoso. Anything to keep out the hateful things Nellie Smith was saying.

The storm was over, the sun was out again. Nellie Smith must have become suddenly afraid Mrs Fenner might return and find us in a posture which required explanation. Or perhaps what she had seen upstairs had confirmed her in her fear of houses. At any rate, she stopped speaking, and let me go.

I said nothing, not even when she smacked me on the side of the head, making my eyes spurt tears.

I said nothing, not even when she smacked me on the other side, before running out of the door. When Mrs Fenner came back with Ellie, who was whimpering like a puppy because she'd had a tooth filled, I reminded her that the new school term would soon be beginning, and in a couple of weeks' time it would be my birthday.

Time to go home.

Alfred made a special journey to collect me and my belongings. He couldn't bring out the piled-up sheets and towels fast enough. I could just see Mrs Hewitt's face when she found them in the wash next Monday, the sheets grey, the towels scratchy as emery paper. I could see Alfred, every time he returned for a fresh load, taking a deep breath before he stepped inside Opposite the Cross Keys and then holding it until he was safely back in the air again.

Of the Fenners only Ellie was at home, combing her hair as usual. She simpered at my handsome brother and informed him with unusual animation, ‘Went to the dentist Tuesday.' Opening her mouth wide, a forefinger poked inside by way of pointer: ‘Filling.'

I could see that Alfred was embarrassed. Protected by a pile of blankets, he mumbled over the top of it, ‘Hope it didn't hurt,' and made for the car.

I said no formal goodbyes. I
felt
goodbyes, though. As we sat round the table that last night I could have howled with the feeling of goodbye which pierced me like a sword. They had only to beg, ‘Don't go! Don't go!' and I would have stayed for ever.

Instead, all that happened was that Charlie, idly turning the pages of an
Eastern Evening News
he had picked up somewhere, observed, ‘They got Charlie Chaplin on at the Haymarket, Sylvie. You ought to get your ma to take you.'

Tom was upset because he had brought me a toad to keep Pillow company, and I had turned down the offer. His soft, red lips quivered with unhappiness. I couldn't very well explain that, after Nellie Smith, I felt that Pillow was safer without friends, so I pretended that May Bowden had proclaimed that there was only room enough for one toad in her rockery.

‘She's barmy!' he protested. ‘If there's room for one, there's room for two.'

‘That's what I told her. But she still says only one.'

‘Barmy!' he repeated with unaccustomed moroseness. I gave him the whipped cream walnut I'd been saving for the journey and he cheered up. He bit the pointed top off, then leaned across the table smelling of the milk chocolate, and whispered, ‘You won't ferget, back in Norwich, to keep that secret I told you?'

‘What secret's that, then?' Mrs Fenner intervened, smiling.

Tom, taking elaborate precautions not to be overheard, whispered, ‘I shown her the spring.'

‘Oh,
that
secret!' exclaimed Mrs Fenner in her normal strength of voice. ‘Sylvie wouldn't go telling anybody about that – would you, Sylvie?'

‘What an idea!' I said.

Bathed and in clean pyjamas, tucked in and kissed with due regard to protocol by my mother, father, Alfred and Maud successively, I lay in my fresh, sweet bed, above my head the greedy guts who, grabbing at too much, held nothing fast. Every now and again a tram went past in the street with a swish like silk, humming the homely little tune trams hum. Very occasionally there was the crisp sizzle of sound which, translated, meant that the long pole with grooved head which stuck up from the tram roof had momentarily come off the wires, spilling sparks like a sparkler.

I lay in my bed and felt homesick for the prickle of horse-hair and the whang of ancient sofa springs; for the benediction of Mrs Fenner's grandpas, the guardian angels of Salham St Awdry.

I was slow to fall asleep in the bed to which my body had become a stranger. Next morning, at breakfast, I answered my parents' questions as to what it had been like at Salham St Awdry with vapid generalizations which seemed to satisfy them well enough. When I launched into a rapturous description of the old-world charm of Mrs Fenner's living-room, Alfred wiped his lips on his napkin and left the table without finishing his toast.

After breakfast I announced that I was going next door to see May Bowden. By then my parents were out of the dining-room and Maud, who had come in to clear away, felt free to observe nastily, ‘Tha's right! Mustn't lose any time sucking up if you don't want her to change her will.'

Just the same, I saw by the gleam in her eye, the one with the cast in it, that she wasn't sorry to have me resume relations with her ancient enemy. I had the impresion that, with me away in St Awdry's, the war between the two of them had lost its savour. Without me, they had been like two opposing hockey players, bullying off with grim intent, only to discover at the last moment that there was no ball.

As it turned out, my reunion with May Bowden would have rejoiced Maud's heart. I had opened and shut her gate as quietly as possible, hoping to tiptoe unnoticed over the cobbles to say hello to Pillow before knocking on the house door.

Engaging as ever, the toad came to my whistle as if I had never been away. Squatting on my haunches, toadlike myself, I had just lifted him on to my palms, his eyes already rolling upward in anticipation of ecstasy, when May Bowden's voice, high and unfriendly at my back, caused the poor little thing to leap for the safety of the rockery, to disappear among the ferns.

‘Well! You're a sight, I must say!'

I scrambled to my feet and stood, head hanging, whilst she circled me, making an inspection.

‘You look like a gypsy! Brown and scratched, hair like a bramble bush. Ladies', she added complacently, touching her own powdered cheeks, ‘have complexions like rose petals, not skins you could make shoes out of. If I'd known you were going to get yourself into that state, I'd have lent you a parasol to take with you.'

I had a momentary vision of myself grubbing for spuds with one hand whilst, with the other, I held aloft one of May Bowden's French parasols, all flounces and tassels. I concentrated on ‘parasol' thankfully. It enabled me to put ‘gypsy' out of mind. I was trying not to think about Nellie Smith.

Something of the devil which informed the gypsy girl's skinny frame took possession of my own, and I said, ‘I don't think I want to be a lady. It's too much of a bother.'

‘When you are rich,' May Bowden answered, ‘you have to do a lot of bothersome things. Ladies have obligations. You'll find out for yourself when I die and leave you all my money.'

Still prompted by Nellie Smith's demon, I asked with minimal politeness that, in that case, would she please leave her money elsewhere, because I didn't want it.

May Bowden's face became plum-coloured under the powder, not ladylike at all.

‘I'll leave my money where I like, Miss Impertinence! If you don't like it, you can lump it!'

I would have run home crying to my mother to come and stop May Bowden from leaving me her money, if the old spinster hadn't gone on to mention something about my impending birthday. As it happened, I desperately wanted for my birthday something that cost a lot of money – a bike – and my mother had said I couldn't have one. Maisie's bicycle, good as new, had been standing in the shed doing nothing ever since my sister had gone to live in London, and there was absolutely no sense in spending money on another which, at the rate I was growing, would be outgrown before the year was out. When I wailed that Maisie's bike was miles too big for me, my mother smiled that seldom smile which, sweet as it was, meant a ‘no' not to be changed by wheedling or whining, or both. ‘You're shooting up like a weed, darling. All you need is a little patience.'

I did not possess a little patience. I did not possess any patience at all. Could I possibly get a new bike out of May Bowden? Not necessarily as a present, but as an advance on those riches which – she had said it, not I – she was going to leave me anyway? Venal as only a child can be in pursuit of its heart's desire, I smiled up into May Bowden's powdery face and coyly admitted that yes, it
was
going to be my birthday and I was praying night and morning – May Bowden was very churchy – for a new bicycle, which was what I wanted most. My mother and father had already said no, I couldn't have one, but I kept on praying, because I knew about the power of prayer and God might see a way to my getting one after all, just as He had seen that the Israelites had got manna falling down from heaven.

My religiosity fell on stony ground.

‘If the bicycle has to fall all that way,' was May Bowden's dry comment, ‘there won't be much left of it by the time it plunks down in your backyard.'

What she herself had got for my birthday present, she promised me, was something that knocked bicycles into a cocked hat. Something precious. Something I would still be treasuring when I was old and grey. She so excited us both with her rhapsodies of description of the unnamed object that the slightest hint from me was enough for her to adopt as her own idea the decision that I should receive it forthwith instead of having to wait until the great day.

‘It will take a little while to wrap up,' she warned me, as she went into the house.

I sat down on one of the rockery stones, happily expectant. Pillow, over his fright, came out from under the ferns and sat on my lap, sunning himself. I stroked his head and he went into his eye-rolling act. I could almost have done the same myself, without the head-stroking, because it had occurred to me that a precious something could well be exchangeable for a bike, one with turned-down handlebars even, to give me joy while I was still young enough to enjoy it.

The package with which May Bowden returned was disappointingly small, but then, you never knew. Rubies and diamonds took up little space and could be worth a king's ransom. I undid the tissue paper with trembling hands, May Bowden looking on, her hands crossed in front of her, the picture of self-satisfaction.

Pillow took one look at my birthday present and hopped off my lap, back to the refuge of the greenery. I became aware that May Bowden was bending over me, presenting her cheek for a kiss.

Nellie Smith, I reflected fleetingly, wishing I possessed even a little of the spirit of my lost friend, would have chucked May Bowden's present straight back in her kisser. I, the little lady of St Giles, dusted my lips among the white powder and said, ‘It's lovely. Thank you very much.'

What May Bowden had given me was a hairbrush, silver-backed and therefore arguably precious, but with most of the bristles worn away and a kind of compacted fluff caking such stumps as remained. Some red hairs, caught in the few bristles which survived intact, moved their tentacles in the warm air.

‘Promise you won't use it till your birthday,' May Bowden admonished.

I promised, and took my leave, repeating the grateful phrases which I knew were expected of me. I dawdled homeward until, risking a quick look backward, I saw May Bowden go into her house; then stopped, looking down at the revolting object in my hands, wondering what on earth to do with it.

My prime thought – oddly enough, for I was not an unselfish child – was not for myself and my disappointed hopes, but for May Bowden herself. I couldn't bear to face Maud with that hairbrush, see the expression of glee spreading over her face as she took in its awfulness, watch the wart on her nose shaking in the gale of her derisive laughter. My mother and father and Alfred, whilst less cruel, would not be exactly kind. They would be sure to repeat that May Bowden wasn't all there. The fact that I knew this as well as anybody didn't give them the right to say it.

Perhaps, too, there was a substratum of feeling that, having lost Nellie Smith, I needed all the friends I had, even the not-all-there ones.