Opposite the Cross Keys (32 page)

‘Can't have that boat of his sinking to the bottom for want of a bag o' nails, can we? Gimme that knife.'

When she had had no better luck than I at coaxing even one shilling through the slot, let alone three, she gave the brisk little nod which I knew meant that she had made up her mind what to do. She took the box over to the hearth, where poker and shovel, brush and tongs shone brightly Brasso-ed, never used except on the rare occasions when I was ill and had to stay in bed, when the sheer gloriousness of a fire in one's bedroom made one wish never to get quite well again. She knelt down and, after a brief contemplation of the possibilities, selected the poker: up-ended the money box and, with one unhesitant movement of the wrist, smashed in the little door in the base.

Returning with the box to the bed, having first meticulously rehung the poker on the little stand which housed the fire implements, she tipped the money out on to the quilt, selected a shilling and a two-shilling piece, and returned the rest to their desecrated cubbyhole.

‘You got the thruppence?' And when I nodded, speechless in the face of her magnificent audacity, ‘Tha's all right, then.' She put the money box back on the mantelshelf, lying it on its side, so the money wouldn't fall out. ‘I always told your ma, keeping it there, one day somebody's bound to catch their sleeve on it, knock it off the shelf afore they could stop it, an' down it'd come like Humpty Dumpty.'

‘Oh no!' I cried, transported by love. ‘I can't let you take the blame! I'll tell her it was me.'

‘You'll do nothing of the kind!' Maud retorted sourly. ‘I didn't bring you up to be a little liar!'

I couldn't decide whether to lie to Chicken or not. I wanted him to think me a brave girl, bold enough to have stolen a whole barrelful of nails if he had requisitioned them, not just a measly little canvas bag. I wanted him to know how the Indian had grabbed at me, only I had slipped from his grasp, eluding both him and the Market policemen, who, truncheons drawn, had pursued me the length and breadth of the Market Place, blowing on their whistles, like cops in a Mack Sennett movie. Oh, I had the choice of a dozen scenarios which I had lain in bed that night happily devising and revising.

In the event, to my disappointment, the subject never even came up. I cycled to Salham St Awdry on Sunday morning, and called in at Chicken's cottage before I even let the Fenners know I was there. Early as it was, Chicken was already busy, shaving a piece of wood, the delicate slivers curling off the spokeshave on to the floor. Absorbed in what he was doing, he took the bag of nails with a casual ‘Ta' and without even checking that they were the right kind. He chucked the bag on to the workbench.

Deflated, I turned to go.

‘Hang on!' Chicken said. He put down wood and spokeshave and came over to me, fiddling in the pocket of his black waistcoat as he came. ‘You forgot somethin'.' He took my hand, cupped it into one of his and, with the other, poured into it a rain of sixpences, seven of them in all. ‘Have to pay me sodding debts, don't I, or you'll have me up in court. Count ' em if you don't believe me,' he went on as I stood dumbly, looking down at the little pile. ‘Don' bother with the change. The thruppence extra's for yer trouble.'

‘Oh, Chicken –' I stammered.

‘Wha's the matter wi' you, gal? Think I expected you to pick 'em up fer nothing?'

That Christmas, I didn't see a lot of Salham St Awdry. St Giles was awash with visitors and I had my social duties to perform. Maud went off home on Christmas Eve, not to return until the evening of Boxing Day, during which period Mrs Hewitt, putting aside her washboard and dolly blue, functioned as a well-meaning but far from adequate substitute. I think the gift which gave Maud most pleasure at the festive season was to come back to St Giles after the junketings were over to find what a mess the house had got into, without her.

School broke up a week before Christmas, so that I was able to spend a couple of days going plucking with Mrs Fenner. Awful as the plucking sheds were in summer, it was as nothing to the hell of winter: draughts like icicles down your back; your feet, no matter how many pairs of stockings you crammed into your shoes, stuck to the frozen concrete as if by magnets. And the feathers! It was unbelievable, the number of feathers the well-dressed goose or turkey wore as a matter of course, each one stuck in place with a glue which could have made their fortunes if they had had the nous to market it.

Cold in the sub-zero temperature, hot with aggravation, we pluckers displayed little of the Christmas spirit as we wrestled with those bloody feathers and held our own against the foreman who came round threatening to dock us if we didn't make a better job of getting them out. Actually, we knew he didn't dare, because for once we had the upper hand, the demand for pluckers at that time of year far exceeding the supply. All the gypsy women were up in Norwich selling sprigs of holly and mistletoe, as well as hideous furry toys that bounced up and down on an elastic string and were guaranteed to send an infant hysterical.

The four and sixpence I got for my two days' work I laid out on a Christmas cake which I had heard Mrs Fenner admiring in the village shop window. It looked a picture, covered with white icing, with a fancy frill round it, and a snowman on top. Unfortunately, when Mrs Fenner came to cut it, at teatime on Christmas Day, she couldn't. It was so hard that even Tom, who was the strongest of the family, couldn't make a dent in it. Village shops didn't turn over their stock all that fast, and it must have been a cake left over from the year before, if not the year before that.

But it turned out all right. When Mrs Fenner went back to complain, once the shop opened up again after the holidays, the shopkeeper, a formidable woman, swore that the cake was as fresh as a daisy. However, when Mrs Fenner threatened to hurl the object in dispute at the shop window, and then they'd find out how fresh it was, or wasn't, as the case might be, she gave back the money, which Mrs Fenner promptly expended in groceries, to show there was no ill will.

I arranged with Tom to go and cut some holly for me to take back to St Giles: he was off work early that afternoon. It was, as always, restful to be in the company of one so at peace with the world. The bright blue eyes in the lovely cherub's face looked at every stick and stone as if seeing it for the first time, and finding it wonderful beyond words. The fields glittered with frost, a gossamer mist clinging to the beeches, as we made our way along Back Lane, past the allotments and the cemetery, to where the best hollies stuck up at intervals along the hedgerows.

Alas, we had left it too late. One plundered tree after the other proclaimed that others had been before us. It was a wonderful year for holly berries. Faced with such plenty, the vandals had been choosy, discarding some branches for others more fructiferous. More upset at Tom's plaintively voiced disappointment than by the shortage of really ‘good' holly, I began to gather up some of the rejected pieces strewn about the verges.

‘These will do.'

‘No, they won't!' The lovely face had become contorted with anger. ‘Measly things like that!' Tom snatched the holly out of my hands and threw it on the ground. I knew better than to argue. ‘We'll go over by Jackson's,' he declared. ‘The best un of all's down over by Jackson's.'

The tree in one of the boundary hedges of Jackson's farm was indeed a nonpareil among hollies. But here again the wreckers had been at work. All the reachable parts of the tree had been gone over with such thoroughness that scarcely a berry remained visible. Only at the top, where a thick core poked through, rather as if a Lombardy poplar were sticking up through the tree's middle, were there trusses of berries too good to be true, and too high up, too difficult for anyone's taking.

I had reckoned without Tom.

‘What I tell you?' he shouted, and began climbing.

To watch that dreadful ascent in silence was impossible, yet I was afraid to call out, to shout up that Maud had said positively no holly that year, the way it scratched the wallpaper and the picture frames. I was afraid to call out because, every now and again, emerging and disappearing among the holly leaves, Tom's face showed, transformed with a determination so utter I knew it was deadly dangerous to make a sound.
‘Please!'
was all I could mutter, under my breath, praying to anyone who might be listening.

The holly tree did not let its last precious cargo go without a fight. Its branches reached for Tom's old greatcoat, slitting the buttonholes, ripping off the epaulettes, tearing the pockets from their anchorage. Crackling insult, the leaves went for his neck, his eyes, his hands. Blood ran down his face, the same colour as the berries. Into my mind unbidden came a picture from one of my favourite legends: Baldur the Beautiful, killed by a shaft of mistletoe, his blood dripping on to the holly berries, turning them red for all time. It was less a holly gathering than a crucifixion.

Ellie was the only one home at Opposite the Cross Keys. She stopped combing her hair when we came in.

‘You got yourself in a fine mess,' she remarked to Tom, before setting to again.

I went through the scullery with him and out to the back, where I pumped some water. There was so much blood in his eyes you couldn't have told they were blue. I was afraid he had been blinded. He bent over the bucket and splashed water over his face and neck until he was wet all down his front. He was in great spirits.

‘We got it, didn't we? I reckon you won't find anyone in Norwich wi' holly better 'n that.'

‘I'll tell everyone how brave you were to get it.'

He wasn't blinded, and though his face looked flayed, his injuries, so far as I could judge, were superficial. There was no first-aid box at Opposite the Cross Keys, but Tom found an old tube of ointment the vet had once prescribed for Gyp, and he put on some of that, and seemed to find it soothing.

He also found some twine with which he went outside and tied the holly, which he had dumped outside the front door, on to the back of my bike. I watched the leaves and the sharp ends of the branches incising deep lines into the paint of the mudguard, but I didn't say anything.

I felt deathly tired. The sun was setting, low and large and red, itself an outsize holly berry. I wondered where I would find the strength to cycle home before dark. Or after.

I roused myself to say, ‘Don't tie it all on. You must keep some for yourselves.'

Tom paused in his task, genuinely puzzled.

‘Us?' he said. ‘The likes of us don't put up holly.'

I said, ‘Christmas is for everyone.'

‘Oh ah,' he said, pulling the last knot tight.

I rode back to Norwich painfully, every small rise a mountain slope. All the way, I could hear the holly taking its revenge on the mudguard. By the time I came up to Horsford Point the last ray of the sun was full on the signboard and I saw beyond peradventure that, whatever I might have thought in the past, it read, for then and thereafter, MANN EGERTON FOR CARS and nothing else.

Without getting off my bike, I bowed my head to the victorious Mann, and continued on my way.

One evening in May I sat in Maud's room in my vest and knickers while she turned up the hem of one of my new school dresses, pale mauve linen with a white collar, programmed with that expensive dowdiness exclusive to schools for the daughters of the gentry. (Eldon House was bourgeois to the core, but no matter: the ideal was all.) In summer, Maud's bedroom, under the tiles, was hot to unbearable: in winter, cold to ditto. In spring it was, to my way of thinking, the pleasantest room in the house with its dormer window giving on to a panoramic view down the hill to the Guildhall and over the roof-tops.

I lounged on Maud's bed with its white honeycomb cover, idly turning the pages of
The School Friend
, waiting for it to be time to try on again. Maud, stitching away in the little embrasure under the window, put her sewing down, got up to push the casement wide. She leaned her forearms on the sill and looked out for a moment, into the soft evening. Immediately her voice burst forth in surprise and alarm. ‘Here come my brother Charlie!' Leaning out until I feared her gaunt body would disappear over the edge: ‘Charlie! Charlie!'

What on earth could be up? That something was, neither of us doubted for a moment. Charlie never came to St Giles. Yet here he was. Something must be dreadfully up.

Maud flew to the door, pausing only to warn me not to dare to follow without first making myself decent. I heard her afternoon shoes with their louis heels clonking downstairs at untypical speed, noisy on the bare treads of the uppermost storey, quieter on the Turkey carpeting below. I ran to my bedroom, stuck head and arms through the first dress I could lay hands on, and hurried down to the kitchen.

Charlie, very red in the face, was ensconced in Maud's special chair, looking important. Having apparently satisfied herself that nobody was dead or dying, Maud had forbidden further reportage until the demands of hospitality had been satisfied. Bursting with curiosity, I was forced to wait until the kettle had boiled, the tea been brewed, a slice of fruit cake cut and arranged on a flowered china plate, before Charlie was permitted to let us know the purpose of his call.

And what a story he had to tell! First, did we know that Chicken had finished his boat? Maud and I looked at each other. Well, we did know and we didn't. For the last three weeks it had indeed looked finished, bright with varnish, the cabin furnished, to a very spartan specification certainly, but with a kettle and crockery of sorts in the galley, pillow and army surplus blankets on the two bunks covered with red American cloth.

Whatever Maud knew (and it was years before she confided that Chicken had promised her the boat was to be called the
Lady Maud
),
I
knew that, whatever the outward appearances, it couldn't be finished so long as no name, no
Lady Sylvie
, was to be seen on its bow. Much as I yearned to be thus celebrated, the boat's completion was something I dreaded. I wanted it to go on a-building for ever. I had grown used to that in-curving, out-curving shape enthroned on its blocks like a reigning god. In a sense, though I had had nothing to do with its actual manufacture, I had made it: my longings, my dreams, the muddled aspirations of my growing mind and body were all embodied in that tubby little craft which did indeed – it must have been to PC Utting's satisfaction – look like an enlarged version of a toy Noah's ark. It would have been no surprise to find that the roof lifted off the red-painted cabin to disclose wooden animals you could take out two by two, and a Mr and Mrs Noah looking worried because the dove had not yet returned with the olive leaf in its beak.