Opposite the Cross Keys (29 page)

I took another look at the grey chunks suspended in mucus and made up my mind.

‘I don't think I really want to live as long as that, thank you.'

The eel catcher turned away in disgust.

‘Barmy's right,' he agreed with Chicken, before reassuming his mantle of silence. ‘Barmy as a barn door.'

After that inauspicious episode it seemed strange to find myself in a boat with Grig, just the two of us, moving in perfect companionship along the dyke,
en route
to a rendezvous with some tench who – the eel catcher had it on the authority of his long experience – would, at that very moment, between dusk and dark, be spawning. Our quarry was not that dreary fish itself, but the eels who also had their sources of information and would be forgathering to feed on the spawn.

‘Watch out fer bubbles,' Grig commanded.

Anxious not to disturb our new accord, I strained my eyes to pierce the skim of mist which hung over the water like dust on old mahogany. The reason I was back in the eel catcher's good graces was the ball of wool which, upon Chicken's mysterious insistence, I had brought with me from Norwich in my blazer pocket.

When, thus prompted, I had asked Maud for some wool, she had countered with the sniff which was her usual response to all such requests.

‘I know you! Knit two, purl two, drop two, an' then you can't be bothered.'

‘Not for me,' I came back with guile. ‘For Chicken.'

That, naturally, was different; and upon my assurance that Chicken had said any old wool would do provided it was strong enough, I was handed a pair of my father's old socks to unravel. Maud, in her so-called idle moments, was never without a tube of worsted divided between four thin steel needles upon which she knitted sturdy if inelegant socks for my father and her own, for Tom and Charlie and her latest love, who did not always last out until the heel was turned, in which case the socks went elsewhere. Only Alfred, who liked silk socks with fancy designs, refused Maud's knitted offerings. It gave me a funny feeling to undo those old socks, the crinkled yarn unwinding round by round, so many hours of Maud's life, the needles clicking. It was as if I were unravelling time itself.

Grig had been delighted with his gift. He had tossed the ball gently from one calloused hand to the other.

‘That'll make a good old number o' bobs,' he said. I was too shy to ask what he meant.

The reason there were only two of us in the narrow, flat-bottomed boat which Grig, using a quant – a kind of punt pole, only shorter and with a thick cap at the end to stop it getting stuck in the mud – propelled along the dyke with the secrecy of a Red Indian paddling his canoe through the Everglades, was that Ellie had flatly refused to take part in the expedition and Chicken, obviously against his inclination, had volunteered to stay behind and keep her company. Ellie, in an unaccustomed burst of eloquence, had let it be known that she didn't hold with water (something I had long suspected). Water drowned you dead. If God had meant people to go on water he'd have made them so's they could walk on it, like Jesus.

Chicken winked at me and said, ‘Hear that, gal Sylvie? Tha's one less we won't have to make room for, when my boat's launched.'

My heart leapt at his words, and I went off happily with Grig, a prospect I might otherwise have found daunting; eager to demonstrate that, so far as I was concerned, water was my natural element.

The mist had thickened. We sat, in the boat, up to our waists in it. When it reaches the top of our heads, I thought, we shan't be here at all: only the mist and the water, the tench spawning, the eels eating.

I summoned up courage to ask Grig if he had known Chicken long.

‘A fair old time.'

Pressing on: ‘Then you must know his real name.'

The astonished look on the eel catcher's face was without artifice.

‘His name's Chicken!' Then he held up a thick finger for silence. We had come to the bubbles.

Grig fished under the seat and brought out a rust-pocked tin which had once contained Pat-a-Cake biscuits. Enough of the label – an obese infant having its hands clapped together by a besotted mum – was left for me to recognize it. The tin's contents, however, were not what I might have expected.

The eel catcher prised off the lid and took out a couple of eel-bobs: worms by the dozen, pink and orange and brown, pierced through and threaded on to thick wool, crinkly like my ball, except that this was grey and mine a heather mixture. Working deftly despite his misshapen hands, Grig weighted the ghoulish contraptions and attached them to short lines. Then he offered one to me. When I flinched away from the hideous object he pressed it gently nearer, until I had to take it for fear of the worms touching my face.

‘It won't bite, gal!' he urged in a hoarse whisper, so as not to alert the fish. ‘Do as I do an' you'll see something! Jest don't let go, now, no matter what.'

Taking a firm hold on the line, the worms wriggling fruitlessly among the coiled wool, he dropped his bob over the side. It was barely in the water before the eels, who could not have thought all that much of tench spawn, began biting. They threshed the surface in a convulsion of greed.

Catching their excitement, I too let down my line. Almost instantly it became heavy with the weight of eels. As they bit into the worms their hateful, hacksaw teeth became tangled up in the wool. No wonder Chicken had stipulated it had to be strong! What an end for my father's socks!

‘Pull the line in quick,' came Grig's calm injunction. ‘They'll saw themselves free afore you can get 'em.' Following his own advice he jerked his line out of the water, the bob a tangle of coils, grey and dirty yellow.

In the middle of the boat was a sturdy box with a hinged lid, propped open, half-full of water. Grig lowered his bob over this container and, with a strong twist of the line, dislodged several of the eels so that they fell into the receptacle provided for them, some going to their doom with the ends of worms hanging down from the sides of their mouths. He produced a pair of nail scissors, something out of a ladies' manicure set, and with meticulous care, avoiding the questing teeth, cut free the eels that wouldn't let go of the bob. They slithered down into the box looking even more revolting than the ones which had preceded them, with strands of grey wool hanging down on either side mandarin-fashion, and slitty, evil eyes like something out of Victorian melodrama.

‘What yer waitin' for, gal?'

I raised the bob out of the water, full of wriggling serpents. I felt at once nauseated, frightened and excited: powerful beyond measure. There was no sport in the pastime. The eels positively struggled to be caught. One might have fancied them eager to make an end of the slime of life if it hadn't been for their equal frenzy, once they were in the boat, to get back to it.

We kept at our deadly game until we had used up all the bobs in the Pat-a-Cake tin, and until the wooden chest was full to overflowing. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain just above my sandal strap. One of the overflow, writhing on the floorboards, had taken a piece out of my ankle.

Grig broke into the loudest noise I had ever heard from him, and slapped his thigh. ‘Now you're a real eel catcher, gal!'

When we got back to the little staithe, Grig bolted down the lid of the wooden chest, hauled it out of the boat and fastened it with ropes to two poles driven into the dyke bank. He adjusted the ropes until the chest hung just below the surface. I saw that it had holes in the sides, too small for the eels to escape through, large enough to let the water flow in and out again. Once a week, the eel catcher told me, a bloke from Yarmouth came along with his boat to collect the catch.

‘We didn't do too bad. Reckon I'll owe you a bit, gal.'

I protested that he owed me nothing, that it had been great fun. At my choice of noun his friendliness drained away.

‘Fun!' he snorted.

Chicken and Ellie were sitting at the table exactly as we had left them. They had lit the lamp, a lantern really, the kind used to warn of road-works ahead. It possessed none of the lovely glow of the lamp at Opposite the Cross Keys. The two looked fed up, I thought. Probably bored stiff with waiting for us. I was ashamed for them to see that none of the tea things had been cleared away. Ellie with her hat on, all ready to go, looked sloppy. The buttons on her cardigan were buttoned up wrongly.

Grig got out some ointment and smeared it on my eel bite. The ointment smelled of fish but was wonderfully soothing. Then he picked up a bulging sack out of a corner, handed Chicken an empty bucket, and the two of them went outside, the contents of the sack clanking. They returned presently, empty-handed.

Chicken said to Grig in his mocking way, ‘You better tell this bloody mauther what's in the sack or she'll be dropping off at the first police station to report we bin thieving.'

Grig was kinder. ‘She'd never do that – would you now?' And when I shook my head dumbly: ‘There, then! Tin't nothin', anyways, but some ole brass bits an' pieces I picked up here an' there, nobody wanted, an' Chicken reckoned'd do fer his boat. Bin glad to find somebody take it off my hands.'

Chicken supplemented, ‘That and some o' them eels you caught. Ma Fenner 'll make a lovely stew. You can tell her you bin in the Garden of Eden today and brought her back the ruddy serpent.'

‘
Mrs
Fenner!' I corrected him, automatically: but a smile followed immediately after, because what he said was true. I
had
been in the Garden of Eden that day. If that meant you had to bring Satan back home with you, it was a small price to pay.

It was a sweet, long-drawn-out autumn that year. Nothing in a hurry, not even winter. The leaves fell off the trees slowly, one by one. As the days shortened, I was less and less in St Awdry's. Although my bike now possessed a fine battery lamp in place of the old carbide one, I wasn't allowed to ride out after dark, not along unlit roads anyway. I would sit in St Giles, doing my homework in the kitchen where it was warm and fortifying snacks were at hand, wondering how Chicken was managing in the poor light.

So far as the boat's progress was concerned, my absence or presence at Opposite the Cross Keys made not the slightest difference. My delight in its building was purely aesthetic: I was not allowed to have anything to do with its making. I didn't feel angry over this, because the Fenners weren't allowed either. It was as if Chicken, who in every other field of endeavour manipulated us all like puppets made to dance to his tune, in this, the supreme effort of his life, had made a vow that the boat was to be the exclusive product of his own labour, his own cleverness, his own dream.

I sat in the kitchen, my exercise books spread out in front of me, whilst, across the table, Maud knitted socks for her latest love – a widower who handed out tracts on the Market Place telling you to repent while there was still time – and pondered aloud the pros and cons of a winter or a spring wedding. Of all her so-called suitors, the widower alarmed me, both because he seemed to have a say in who went to heaven and who to hell, and because, as he was so religious, I was afraid he couldn't be wooing Maud just for the Woodbines and the Dairy Milk, like all the others.

Raising my head from my long division, I asked, ‘Would you really rather live with Mr Roberts than go on living here with us?'

‘What you mean?' Maud demanded, as if one thing had nothing to do with the other.

‘Well, you couldn't live here
with
him, could you?'

‘Don't be daft!'

‘Well, you couldn't, could you?'

‘Get on wi' your homework!' Maud ordered. ‘Now look what you done – you've made me drop a stitch!' And she bent over her knitting, her face red and confused.

Whenever I did get to St Awdry's that autumn – on Sundays usually, Maud catching the bus now that my parents' jaunts to Cromer were over for the season – it was to find, in some way not easy to define, a changed Opposite the Cross Keys. The mood was softer, harmonious. If the world was still a great laugh, there was less irony about the laughter. Even the two grandparents on the wall seemed to have mellowed with the declining sun, the one with the high collar losing his starchy look, the other his air of derisive unbelief. The boat next door, growing in its whitewashed habitation like a foetus in the womb, filled us with the wonder of creation. While Chicken toiled unremittingly from dawn to dusk, as God must have done during those gruelling first days, snatching (as God could not have, mugs, tea and bread and cheese being not yet created) a mug of tea or a bite of bread and cheese as occasion offered, we crept in from time to time and sat without speaking, watching: and presently, still without a word spoken, crept out again.

It is possible, in the prevailing climate, that I too, young and thoughtless as I was, mellowed a little: noticing for the first time, for instance, that Mrs Fenner's contributions to the family exchequer had fallen off with the end of summer, and that life at Opposite the Cross Keys was harder in consequence. The late peas were picked, the last potatoes lifted. There was not all that much call for pluckers. People, even the better-off ones, were saving up for the Christmas goose or turkey and going easy on poultry in the meantime. Some Sunday afternoons Mrs Fenner and I would walk over to one or other of the poultry farms, hang over the gate and run a practised eye over the fattening flock, our future clients. Good times were coming, we willed them to come quickly. No goose or turkey for the Fenners, of course, but money for plucking, plucking, plucking till the feathers came out of your belly button. In the meantime, to bridge the gap in my small way, I took to laying out my pocket money for the oranges or the jam tarts Mrs Fenner could no longer afford on her Saturday forays into the Market Place.

The gatherings round the table at Opposite the Cross Keys became more subdued in character, Mr Fenner puffing away in his private cloud, his old trilby pulled well down over his ears,
Old Moore
unopened on his lap; Tom sitting quietly smiling at private thoughts, Charlie frowning at his; Ellie, now that it was too cold to sit outdoors, busy with her comb within, Chicken occasionally rousing himself to hold up a hair which he swore he had just that moment fished out of the marge. Most of the time, obsessed with the next step to be taken in the building of the boat, the next problem, he seemed hardly to notice we were there.