Opposite the Cross Keys (6 page)

‘Look here – I said I'm sorry, didn't I?'

‘Not so's I heard it!'

Maud straightened her hat, feeling tenderly to make sure the cherries were still in place, picked up her handbag from the floor. My parents, as was normal when any unpleasantness was in the air, pretended they were admiring the scenery.

Quite deliberately, I looked out at the ugly brick public house with its swinging sign and asked in my little-girl voice, ‘And is
their
address Opposite the Fenners?'

Suddenly, whilst everyone, even Maud, was laughing as intended, a much better, a stupendous, idea struck me.

‘Can I stay with Maud? I don't really want to go to Cromer. I'd much rather stay here with Maud. Can I, Maud – can I?'

With a child's unconscious cruelty, I had appealed to where power lay. Still, it was my mother who answered, taking no apparent offence.

‘You can't possibly do that, dear! It's Maud's day off. It isn't fair to ask her to work on Sundays.'

‘But I'm not
work
!' I cried, outraged to be put in the same category as sweeping out the yard.

Maud interjected abruptly, ‘She can do what she likes, far as I'm concerned.'

‘That's very kind of you, Maud.' But my mother protested, rather pathetically, ‘Except that we've got a picnic –'

‘I could pull off a leg or a wing –' Maud, having prepared the feast the evening before, knew exactly of what it consisted – ‘if it's her dinner you're worried about.'

‘Of course I'm not worried about that,' my mother came back quickly, though looking as if she had suddenly realized that perhaps she ought to have worried. What kind of meal could the Fenners, so poor, so primitive, provide for her darling? The cottages opposite the Cross Keys must be all right, if Maud lived there; but none of the four exteriors was such as to instil confidence in what lay behind their façades of crumbling brick. One of them even appeared to be derelict, with its windows filled in with flattened petrol cans.

My father tore himself away from his contemplation of the scenery to say gently, but firmly, ‘Maud will take the whole chicken and whatever else she fancies to her mother with our compliments. See to it, Alfred, would you mind?' And, to my mother, ‘You and I, my dear, will lunch at the Cliftonville – all right? I can't tell you how glad I am to be spared chicken with sand flies down on Cromer beach.'

Alfred obediently opened the car door on his side and got out into the road.

‘Best thing,' he suggested, ‘would be if they took the whole hamper. We can pick it up when we pick
them
up on the way back.'

Maud said, admitting no contradiction, ‘We'll be taking the bus, thank you very much. We won't want to have to lug that with us.' I could see that she was still bursting to tell my brother what she thought of his driving. Instead, she said to my mother, ‘You won't want to be worrying about the time on account of
her
, and
we
won't need to be kept hanging about waiting for
you
.'

‘If you're sure …' My mother was looking childishly pleased at the prospect of Sunday lunch at the smartest hotel in Cromer. She loved treats and being taken out. ‘I hope Sylvia's properly grateful, that's all – you giving up your day off to her …'

‘I'm not giving up anything,' Maud returned. ‘And by the time the day's over, she'll be sorry she asked.'

My mother laughed, a little anxiously. She fumbled in her handbag and brought out half a crown to cover my fare home. Maud, whose total weekly wage consisted of four of those same half-crowns, accepted the coin with the cool acknowledgement, ‘Three-pence ha'penny, half-price single. It'll be enough.'

She stood up to get out of the car. Alfred, who had disinterred the roast chicken and a bag of fruit from the picnic basket, appeared from the rear and handed her down from the running board with a slyly exaggerated old world courtesy. If St Awdry's were indeed looking on – and, though there wasn't a soul in sight, later experience convinced me that it was, with a curiosity not far short of passion – he did her proud. She took over the food and rewarded him for his gallantry with, ‘I reckon all you need is a bit more practice.'

I kissed my parents goodbye and followed Maud out.

My mother admonished me fondly, ‘Be a good girl, now!'

‘Some hope!' said Maud, but not until my brother had set the Morris Oxford on its course again, my mother waving until the road curved just by the Swan, and hid them from our sight.

I stood outside the Cross Keys feeling the way I imagine the Pope feels when he arrives in a new country and the first thing he does is go down on his knees and kiss the ground: humble and at the same time triumphant.

Every Sunday Maud went home for the day, something I resented bitterly. It wasn't that I couldn't live without her. On the contrary, the peace that descended upon the household on Maud's day off, the lack of reprimands, sarcasms, orders to do this, that and the other, was something precious to be savoured. Frequently, on Sundays, my mother and father took me to see ruins which, for some reason, they seemed to prefer to buildings with window panes and roof properly
in situ
; or we went to have tea with friends who made a delightful fuss over me and, unlike Maud, let me eat as many cakes as I wanted and no three pieces of bread and butter first. Life without Maud was perfectly acceptable so long as I was the one who chose to be without. For Maud to go off and leave me without so much as asking my permission was quite another kettle of fish.

But now, I had actually arrived!

Waiting for a gap in the coast-bound traffic, Maud gave me the bag of fruit to hold. She hoisted the box containing the chicken under her arm. Awkwardly, thus impeded, she began to fiddle with her hat. I grew afraid that she was going to take off the bunch of cherries, but all she did was remove the two hatpins, one at the front, one at the back.

‘Oh goody!' I cried out in my relief. ‘Then I'm not work after all!'

‘Work?' echoed Maud, already gone over to her native tongue. ‘Oh no! Bloody hard labour!'

My astonishment at hearing from those lips a word which was never, never uttered in St Giles – or if it sometimes seemed to me to have been uttered, then, no matter how much I insisted to the contrary, I must have misheard it – was as nothing to my astonishment at what happened next.

Maud took off her hat.

I suppose I must have seen her bareheaded before, when I was too young to have noticed. I cannot believe that even Maud would have pinned her cap on before picking me up for my 2 a.m. feed and nappy change. I only knew that, consciously, I had never before seen her with head bare, noting for the first time that the centre parting in her hair was not quite straight. There was a little wiggle just above the point where it disappeared into the bun, which appeared larger than it usually looked peeping from under her headgear.

Nothing could have made me more aware of the uniqueness of the occasion; and when Maud went further, actually handed me the hat to carry, I received it as I might have received the Holy Grail.

‘Just one thing afore we cross over –' Maud spoke as if the road were the Jordan, as, in a sense, it was – ‘St Awdry's in't Norwich, so don't you go thinking it is. Anything that don't suit your ladyship, you'll have to lump it. No turning your nose up, if you know what's good for you.'

‘I won't turn my nose up, I promise!' Because of the hat and the bag of fruit I could not, as I wanted, fling myself at her out of sheer happiness. ‘I
do
love you, Maud.'

A sniff. ‘Tell me the old, old story.'

The rule was to hold hands crossing a road but, again, the hat prevented it. Instead, Maud put her free arm round my waist. Did I imagine that she held me tighter than was strictly necessary to secure my safe passage? Held me lovingly?

Mrs Fenner was waiting for us with her front door open, filling the narrow aperture so that I could not see the room behind. It being a day when everything was new and wonderful, I wasn't surprised that she hadn't a hat on either, and was wearing a dress instead of the old-fashioned costume which, up to then, was all I had ever seen her in. It was a pretty awful dress, made like a coat with buttons down the front, and gaps, through which some kind of greyish undergarment was visible, between one buttonhole and the next. The dress had short sleeves. I had never seen Mrs Fenner's bare arms before, strong and freckled and friendly.

‘Well, I must say!' she greeted me. ‘Look what the wind's blown in.'

Maud said, ‘She
would
come. Think you can put up with her a full day?'

‘I reckon.' Mrs Fenner did not kiss me. She put her hand on my head and stroked my hair as if I were a young animal. ‘If she can put up with us.'

‘Oh yes!' I promised fervently.

‘Better not speak too soon!'

Maud said with a touch of hauteur, ‘We come in the car.'

‘I saw. You still talkin' to us?'

‘Oh ma!' Maud burst out laughing. Another first. I had not dreamed she harboured a laugh like that inside, her, a laugh almost as good as her mother's, and felt momentarily aggrieved. She had no business keeping such secrets from me. ‘We got some things for you. Take that hat, will you, afore Sylvie takes a bite out of it. Everyone home?'

‘Charlie's off somewhere.' Mrs Fenner relieved me of the hat and led the way indoors. Heart beating, I followed, along a shaft of sunlight, treading on tiles that looked as if piddocks had been at them, the room otherwise so dark I could hardly make out anything after the brightness outdoors. The one small window was all but blocked with geranium plants growing every which way, all leg and leaf, no flower.

In that narrow shaft of light I saw the horsehair-covered sofa, the stuffing poking through in several places, which later was to be my Salham St Awdry bed. It had a carved back with whose every curlicue, every rich little pocket of dust, my probing fingers, in that blissful interval between bedtime and sleep, were to become lovingly familiar. On the wall above the sofa hung two large sepia photographs framed in a vaguely sacramental way, the wood beading extended at each corner to form little crosses.

Whilst my eyes were readjusting themselves, the sofa and the photographs were all that I saw with any clarity. The smell, on the other hand, hit me with an immediacy explicit and overwhelming. Soot and cheap tobacco, the day's – the past year's – cooking, farmworkers' clothes encasing farmworkers' unbathed bodies, rag rug on which had taken their ease uncounted generations of dog: in time I was to analyse with precision, even affection, the components of the Opposite the Cross Keys smell. On my first encounter with it – oh the shame of that moment! – my chest heaved, my breakfast rose up out of my stomach like Leviathan from the deep. It was as if, upon reaching heaven, the goal of all his striving, Christian's first reaction to the odour of sanctity was to throw up.

Which I did, copiously, filling the little piddock holes with my sick.

‘Too much excitement,' pronounced Maud, as calmly as if I were sick every day of the week. She bent my head forward, manipulating me gingerly so as not to get vomit on her best costume, whilst Mrs Fenner disappeared through an inner door, returning with a dwile
¹
and a galvanized bucket spilling over with water. Maud herself then vanished through a smaller door at the side of the fireplace, papered over with the baskets of roses and lilacs which covered all the walls. I heard her footsteps ascending an uncarpeted stair and even noted that the ceiling billowed a little as she moved about the room above.

I cried, needing her.

She was back in less time than it seemed to me, having taken off her best clothes and changed into a dress very like her mother's, except that hers was flat all the way down, with no gaps between the buttonoles. The arms emerging from the short sleeves were thin and wiry, without a single freckle.

‘Now, then,' she said, and propelled me smartly in the direction her mother had taken to get the water; across a kind of scullery where most of the floor space was taken up by a brick copper, out of the back door into a garden more correctly described as an area of rough land which stretched impartially behind all four of the Opposite the Cross Keys cottages without hedge or fence to divide it.

In the middle of this shaggy place was a pump with a bucket hanging on its iron spout; and here Maud stopped and carefully removed my soiled dress, which she put to one side. From somewhere she produced a bar of soap, a towel and, most amazing of all, another of my dresses, an old one, a favourite, which I can only think she had packed in the car against some mishap with sea or sand, and retrieved – hidden in her handbag or concealed among the roast chicken – following our change of plan.

‘You want to pump?'

It was the completion of the cure. In my world water came out of taps or geysers. Only in fairy tales did it manifest itself out of pumps, usually operated by goose girls who turned out to be princesses under a spell.

The sound of that first splash into the tin bucket was pure enchantment. I forgot the embarrassment of being sick in somebody else's house, and – a close second – of being out of doors where anybody might see you, clad only in vest and knickers. I pumped water for me to wash in, water for Maud to wash in, and then I pumped water all over the dress I'd been sick in, sluicing all the horrid little bits away in a glorious cascade.

I pumped until Maud, doubting sourly that enough water was left in the pump to keep the inhabitants of Opposite the Cross Keys from dying of drought, made me desist. By the time she had slipped the second dress, the old favourite, over my head and combed my hair with a comb produced providentially from her pocket, the awfulness of what had happened had receded into oblivion, swallowed up by renewed happiness; nothing remaining but my dress drying on the clothes line, and a dampness slow to disappear on the piddocked floor.