Opposite the Cross Keys (30 page)

One problem, just the same, he took time out to solve with characteristic energy and ingenuity. One Sunday, when we were at table, Mrs Lord called round with her daughter. They refused tea. It was not a social call. Mrs Lord also refused a seat, but Maud got up and offered hers to the daughter, Doreen, who accepted thankfully. Doreen was a short young woman so far gone in pregnancy as to look like a great big ball on which was balanced another, smaller – her head. Not to beat about the bush, Mrs Lord said, what she had called round to ask was, what was Charlie going to do about it?

No sooner had she stated her purpose than Charlie, red-faced, stood up and said that what he was going to do about it, he personally, whatever
it
might be, was go out. Doreen knew very well that all they'd had together was a bit of fun that didn't amount to a row of pins, and if she was thinking to lumber him with another bloke's bastard, she had another think coming. With heavy sarcasm he supposed that she and her ma must have worked their way through the list if they'd got to him at last, scraping the bottom of the barrel.

‘Evenin' all!' he finished, ramming his cap down over his eyes as he went out into the deepening dark.

Doreen Lord began to whimper, and Mrs Fenner poured out a cup of tea for her, very strong as it had been brewing I don't know how long. Personally, I found Doreen Lord very interesting because up to that moment I had not actually known for a fact that an unmarried girl could have a baby unless she was the Virgin Mary who did not count, being a special case. When I later mentioned to my friend Dora Chapman how astonishing it was, this further exception to the rule, she burst out laughing.

‘Don't they teach you nothing at that posh school of yours?'

Chicken now took a hand, debonair and disarming. You could see Mrs Lord was mesmerized by his Ronald Colman moustache.

‘Cup o' tea 'll give you strength, missus' – insisting that she take his place on the sofa. ‘Nothin' like a cup o' tea for softening the shock.'

‘What shock's that, then?' Mrs Fenner inquired tartly, bringing the tea nevertheless. ‘Tin't mumps that gal's come down with. She didn't swell up like that overnight.'

Chicken looked reproachful.

‘A sensitive lady don't get over a shock to her nerves that easy – in't that right, missus?' Mrs Lord glowed. ‘What we got t' do is stop tradin' insults an' see what can be done tha's best for all concerned, including the babby.'

At that we all stared at Doreen Lord's stomach as if we expected the baby to stick its head out and make its own contribution to the discussion. Instead, the mother-to-be spoke up on his, or her, behalf. ‘I dunno,' she reflected, more wondering than bitter, ‘you'd think, wouldn't you, out of thirteen on 'em, one at least 'd take his rightful responsibilities.'

‘Men!' Chicken exclaimed, in the accents of one who himself belonged to a superior species. ‘Not one in thirteen, you say? Always say thirteen's an unlucky number. You got a note of their names?'

Mrs Lord took a piece of paper out of her coat pocket and passed it over. Chicken smoothed it out and took it to the lamp.

‘You can call this thirteen eleven to start off with,' he announced at the end of his scrutiny. ‘That could change your luck. Two o' these here blokes are spliced. You don't want to break up the happy home now, do you?'

Mrs Lord's face set stony and unforgiving. ‘They should 'a thought of that afore they took avantage of a poor young gal. How's
she
ever goin' to get herself a husband if the father of that child don't make an honest woman out of her?'

‘Tha's jest the problem, in't it, missus?' said Chicken in that lovely, beguiling voice he could put on when it suited him (how cynical I could be about that voice, so long as it wasn't directed at
me
!). ‘Which one o' them
is
the pa, tha's the question. One or two – even three – they could 've sorted it out between theirselves. But eleven! A ruddy cricket team! You see the difficulty, missus.'

Now both visitors began to cry. My own eyes watered in sympathy, less for the wronged Doreen than for the poor little baby, doomed to be an orphan before it was even born.

‘Charlie, now …' Chicken addressed himself to Mrs Fenner. ‘You reckon he could run to a tanner a week?'

‘Why should he run to anything?' Mrs Fenner began heatedly. ‘He never –'

‘Never mind what he never.' Chicken held up his hand magisterially. ‘We got a little babby to think of. We don' want it to have to go on the parish, do we? Get the village a bad name. What you say, missus? All right if I put Charlie down fer a tanner?'

Mrs Fenner conceded with reluctance. ‘On' y if all the others do the same.'

‘Leave it t' me,' Chicken assured her. ‘They will.' And, to Mrs Lord, ‘Eleven at sixpence a week – five shilling an' sixpence! You can bring a babby up like a prince on five an' six a week. Five an' six to do what you bloody like with, no lovin' hubby to give you a clout, take it out of your purse, an' go off with it to the pub. You'll be quids in! What you say?'

Mother and daughter looked at each other. Then Mrs Lord said, ‘Suppose they don't pay.'

‘Leave it t' me,' said Chicken again. ‘They will.'

And they did. Next morning, as soon as the village shop was open, Chicken crossed the High Street and, with his own money, bought Doreen a notebook with a soft red cover. He ruled the pages into columns, each with a name at its head, and a space for the date; and then – it showed how kind he was under the mocking exterior, taking all that time away from his boat – he got hold of all Doreen Lord's lovers, one after the other, and showed each the column with his name at the top.

‘Easy as winking,' he replied when Mrs Fenner asked him how he had got on.

Two weeks later the baby was born, a boy. When his mother began to push him out everybody in the village came to peep into his pram; but they were disappointed – or, perhaps, relieved. The little fellow, who was called Rudolph, after Valentino, was the spitting image of his ma.

Every Saturday she went round collecting her dues, licking her pencil point as she entered them up in her book. It became an accepted part of village life. In fact, I think the men on her list became quite proud of stumping up their tanners. It showed they were somebody. And when, fourteen months later, she was brought to bed of another child, a girl this time, they cheerfully upped it to ninepence, Charlie included.

One afternoon when I got back from school late on account of my music lesson, Maud greeted me with triumph writ large and ugly on her face. She must have been listening for the sound of my bicycle tyres over the paving stones, for, despite the dank mist already rising, she came out to the shed, the quicker to get the ball rolling.

As I shut the shed door and clicked the padlock to, she began in her teasing way, ‘Well, she finally went and did for herself, didn't she?'

It was a tone of voice she reserved exclusively for May Bowden, a tone that invariably, if only for the moment, made me like May Bowden more than I usually liked her. I hefted my schoolbag and my music case and went towards the open kitchen door, knowing I had only to stay silent to be told all.

What May Bowden had done, it turned out, didn't sound as final as all that; but it was enough to tip the balance between my parents allowing me to go on visiting her, and their laying down a general prohibition upon any further intercourse between us. May Bowden was a good three inches taller than my mother. That morning, coming up St Giles behind her, she had suddenly, for no conceivable reason, stretched out one of her long, bony hands and tipped my mother's hat – the one with the kingfisher feather on it – forward over her eyes.

That wouldn't have so bad, if only people passing by hadn't laughed. But they had, and May Bowden herself had guffawed in a most unladylike way. My mother, understandably, was less amused. More to the point, more serious issues were involved. It was a case of the straw hat that broke the camel's back. Today a hat, tomorrow, who knew what the dotty old maid might get up to? Henceforth her home was out of bounds to me.

It was typical of my mother to leave to Maud the imparting of what she felt would be distressing news. In this, to be truthful, she was partly mistaken. For some time I had gone into May Bowden's house with increasing hesitation – chiefly, I think, because it had become so dark. In the past, the creeper which covered the outside walls had always been kept meticulously clipped round the windows, but for months now the jobbing gardener who came in once a week had been told to leave it alone. The result, after the summer, was that the windows were covered with long trails that, from within, looked pitch black, not crimson. By autumn, the house had become a cave, dim and mysterious.

I went to my mother and promised that I wouldn't go into May Bowden's house ever again. I was most specific about my form of words. The house. I said nothing about the garden.

I could not, after all, desert Pillow, who would soon be shutting up shop for the winter, descending to some secret hiding place in the depths of the rockery from which even my whistles could not summon him. How long did toads live? I had no idea. Would Pillow ever awaken again to the call of spring? The little creature became dearer to me day by day as the year advanced, and I faced the imminent loss of him, for months if not for ever.

That Saturday morning I got up early, too early for May Bowden to be about, and went into her garden. I moved quietly over to the rockery and whistled softly, hoping it was loud enough for Pillow to hear. After a while I whistled again, Louder. Again no toad appeared.

He's waiting for his blood to warm up, I told myself, parting a browning clump of hart's tongue fern on the chance I might get a glimpse of him in that interesting condition.

The toad lay splayed out, dead; dreadfully dead. Something viscous and horrible had oozed from the smashed skull on to the large, flat stone on which he lay. There was more of the stuff on a smaller stone nearby, a stone which could well have been the instrument of the poor creature's undoing.

Unable or unwilling to take in what I saw, I called him softly: ‘Pillow! Pillow!'

‘Somebody's up with the lark,' said a voice behind me.

I hadn't heard May Bowden's door open. The woman wore a burgundy velvet dressing gown, very grand, and on her head a pale blue crêpe de Chine nightcap, trimmed with ribbons and lace. From my crouching position I stared up at her.

Anything better than looking at the dead toad.

‘What have you done to him?' I whispered. I can't tell how I knew May Bowden was the murderer. I just knew it.

‘Done to him?' May Bowden echoed. She sounded offended. ‘I haven't done anything.' She regarded the violated little body without pity. ‘Tell him to get up at once, the lazy thing, and pull himself together.'

Suddenly I was standing up, tugging at the fine dressing gown. ‘He can't get up!' I screamed. ‘He can't pull himself together! You've killed him!'

‘Let go my dressing gown this minute, miss!' May Bowden pushed my hands away and smoothed down the velvet pile with tender hands. ‘Such manners!'

‘Why – why?'

‘I whistled and whistled,' said May Bowden, looking at me with childish spite. ‘I whistled till I was blue in the face. I gave him every opportunity, but he would not come. Open defiance! To me, the one who provides him with all his necessities, who does everything to make his life one of comfort and ease!
You
only have to whistle once and he comes running. What's so special about
your
whistles that he comes to
them
and not to mine?' Resuming her customary air of self-congratulation: ‘That toad had to be taught a lesson, and a lesson is what he has been taught.'

I howled. I was deadly frightened, I wanted to run away, but grief possessed me, glued me to the spot.

‘Don't be so dramatic, child.' May Bowden went back into her house. Before she shut the door she poked her nightcapped head out into the air again. ‘All this fuss about a stupid frog!'

I stayed on in the garden for a little, crouched over the rockery, my eyes tight shut. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't think.

As usual, when I couldn't think, there was only one thing to do. I ran back home to Maud. She was setting the table for breakfast. I flung myself at her, buried my head in her morning apron, smelling the stiff white cleanness of it.

When she had heard my story, Maud went and got an old
Telegraph
from the cupboard, told me to go upstairs and wash my face whilst she went round the corner to see what was what. She wasn't away long, although to me, waiting at the back door for her return, it seemed an age. At last I heard her footsteps, heard them stop at the dustbins; heard a dustbin lid being lifted up, and a galvanized clank as it was replaced.

This time, it was at Maud I flew, her crime appearing to me at least as great as May Bowden's. I pummelled her with clenched fists, I tore her apron from its waistband.

‘You can't put Pillow in the dustbin! You can't throw him away as if he was rubbish! How would
you
like to be put in the dustbin when you're dead?'

‘If I was dead I don't suppose it 'd bother me one way or the other. The dustman might have something to say.'

Her calm, her familiar derision, brought me to my senses in a way no loving commiserations could have done. She made no reference to her torn apron other than to remark: ‘That one's gone for a burton.'

Still, I whimpered. ‘We could take him back to St Awdry's, give him a proper burial –'

‘With wreaths, I suppose, the organ playing an' the rector spouting? To say nothing of upsetting Tom something dreadful. You wouldn't want to do that, would you?'