Opposite the Cross Keys (8 page)

Maud wasn't even looking at me, but the old man on the wall over the sofa did. I didn't like the way he looked at me at all; and just to spite him, I picked up the awful old knife and fork with which Maud had provided me, took up a mouthful of food, and ate it.

To say that I did not enjoy it is an understatement, but I got it down somehow, and after that the going was easier. Not because the second and the following mouthfuls were any more to my taste than the first, but because, though nothing in her face showed it, I could feel Maud's approval radiating like sunlight through my entire being. Inconspicuously, and as though I were licking a morsel of food off my upper lip, I put out my tongue at the old man. Tom said, and I understood every word of it, ‘Want me to catch you a toad this arternoon?'

‘Oh, yes please!' I exclaimed, before I realized the wonder of it, the miracle. ‘Yes, please!'

Tom said, ‘I know where there's a good toad, if no one's bin an' got there first.'

Tom not only kept his cap on at table, as his father did his trilby hat, he kept on his coat as well: in fact, all the time I knew him I never saw him not wearing it. It was a khaki greatcoat which had lost most of its buttons and acquired, with age, the look of bark covered with lichen.

Tom put his hand into one of the pockets and brought out a large snail, which he placed among the plates and food on the table.

‘You can have him too, if you want.'

As it happened, I had been afraid of snails ever since Dorothy Coulton, a girl at Eldon House, had shown me how, if you poured salt on to the opening in their shells when they were curled up inside, they frothed like Eno's Fruit Salts and died, except that the froth was green, or sometimes prussian blue. So I was relieved when the snail, which was waving its eyes about in a way which boded no good to anyone, moved towards Mrs Fenner's plate, not mine.

If it had been Dorothy Coulton, iron-nerved as she was, sitting there in my place, she would undoubtedly have seized the packet of Saxa Salt which stood on the table, and sprinkled the little monster without a qualm, but I was made of weaker stuff. How many tests, I wondered agonizedly, did you have to pass before you were given the freedom of Opposite the Cross Keys?

Fortunately for me, Mrs Fenner exploded in one of her enormous laughs and exclaimed, ‘Sylvie don't want no truck wi' that rubbish! What you think we are, bor, Frenchies?' She picked up the snail, went and put it in one of the flower pots on the window sill. ‘There!' she announced, returning to the table. ‘That'll keep him happy till you've finished your dinner.' To me, she said, ‘You heard the Frenchies eat ' em, han't you, jest like winkles? Funny ole world, in't it?'

Charlie Fenner, the youngest of the family, came in just then, and hung his cap on a peg on the door into the scullery. It was a surprise to see a he-Fenner bareheaded. Small and strong-looking, he was a younger edition of his father, only less good-humoured: no crinkly lines at the corners of his bright blue eyes.

He was dressed nattily for a working man: navy blazer and grey flannels such as my brother Alfred often wore, yet not at all the same, really. An apology for a badge on the blazer, and trousers of that horrid thick cloth which seemed at permanent odds with the human form. Even though it was immediately obvious that we had got off on the wrong foot – all unknowingly, I was sitting in his place – I couldn't help feeling sorry for him for being such a poor imitation of Alfred.

When Mrs Fenner said, as one announcing good news, ‘We got gal Sylvie here for the day,' his only acknowledgement was a querulous ‘Oh ah?' He gave me an irritable once-over and went into the scullery for a stool which turned out to be much too low, only there wasn't any other. His chin practically touched the table.

‘You're late.' Maud plumped his plateful down so that he nearly stuck his nose in it. ‘Where you been, then?'

Charlie did not answer; tucked into his dinner hungrily, though with no appearance of enjoyment. Mrs Fenner intervened mockingly, ‘What you mean, where's he bin, on the Lord's Day? Singing the praises o' the Lord, tha's where he's bin – eh, Charlie?'

Maud looked surprised.

‘You been to Chapel? You never!'

‘Wrong Lord,' said Mrs Fenner. ‘Doreen, Mrs Lord's little angel, over past the mill. Holds an organ service Sundays an' every night o' the week.'

Charlie looked up from his food, suddenly cheerful and good-natured.

‘Give over, ma. Didn't you an' pa never go courtin'?'

‘Me an' your pa?' Mrs Fenner's laughter rocked the room once more. ‘Picked him up under me arm an' wouldn't let him down till he said “I will!”'

Mr Fenner smiled across the table.

‘Tha's right …'

The two smiled at each other contentedly.

When dinner was over, Tom went over to the geraniums, retrieved his snail with little soothing sounds, and dropped it back in his pocket. In a voice full of happy importance he said to me, ‘Better see about that toad afore somebody else gets his paws on it,' and hurried out.

As soon as he had gone Maud stated baldly, ‘If you're thinking of taking a toad back to Norwich, Miss, you've got another think coming. One dumb animal's as much as I can manage.'

‘Oh! But Tom –'

‘Never mind Tom. We'll put it down somewhere he don't see, before we catch the bus. No waterworks!' she commanded, seeing from my face that I was getting ready to turn on the stopcock. ‘Where you keep a toad in St Giles?'

‘I'm sure May Bowden would let me keep it in her garden. I could always go and play with it there.'

Maud's brow darkened as it always did at any mention of her rival.

‘That one! Wouldn't trust her with a grasshopper! And anyway, wild animals ain't for playing with.'

The toad question remained unresolved. Whilst Mrs Fenner put away the leftover food, using the rusty old range in the scullery as a larder, I helped Maud wash up. She poured sooty water from the kettle into a basin from which most of the enamel had vanished, adding cold water from the pail on the floor. I did the wiping with what looked like a piece of old sheet, absorbent enough but shedding bits of lint on to the plates which Maud handed to me still a little greasy and speckled with soot. In Norwich she'd have gone through the roof to see plates washed up like that, but in St Awdrey's it obviously didn't matter. What a glorious place it was!

I took the plates back to the living room a few at a time. Charlie had gone and Ellie had taken a chair outside. She had left the front door open, and through it I could see her sitting in the sun, chewing a cream bonbon and combing her hair with a languid rise and fall of fleshy arm. She had done nothing to help with the clearing away. ‘The lazy mauther!' I muttered under my breath, broadening my vowels and savouring the saying of it. I went back to the scullery and said to Maud, ‘Gimme a dwile, bor, I'll gi' the tablecloth a lick.'

‘Who you taking the mickey out of?' The tone was truculent but I could see Maud was pleased to hear me speaking the native lingo. She handed me a smaller piece of sheet, first wringing it out in the washing-up water. I went back and wiped over the oilcloth, guiding the crumbs and bits of this and that into my hand. My hand wasn't big enough and several bits fell on the floor, which didn't matter.
O glorious St Awdrey's, where such things didn't matter!

I brushed the bits off my hand into the fire, where they raised little points of flame that lasted less than a second. Mr Fenner was back in his non-rocking rocking chair at the side of the hearth, wearing wire-rimmed half-spectacles and reading his
Old Moore's Almanac
. He needed the spectacles because he was engulfed in a cloud of evil-smelling smoke which rose from his clay pipe. It was so thick I couldn't think how he could see to read, even so.

He peered out of the smoke and told me I was a good gal. My ma must be pleased to have a good gal like that to help her in the house. I didn't think it politic to admit that she didn't; that it was Maud who cleared away the St Giles crumbs and anything else that needed clearing up, me particularly.

Mr Fenner sucked in his cheeks and blew out a great blast of cloud. It didn't smell anything like the way my father's tobacco smelled.

‘Made it myself' – gently boastful. ‘Grew it, an' picked it an' cured it, none of your shop rubbish. What you think of that?'

Eyes watering, I mimed surprise and admiration.

‘I expec' you notice it smells a bit different from your ordinary shag?'

I nodded through the haze. Mr Fenner's tobacco smelled a lot different from anything.

Lowering his voice as if he feared to have his secret stolen by spies sent out by the tobacco companies, Mr Fenner explained, ‘Threepennyworth of rum poured over afore you shred it, an' left for a week to sink in.' He offered charmingly, ‘I don't mind giving you a bit, if you like, to take home to your pa.'

I answered, truthfully, that my mother didn't like my father smoking a pipe.

‘Oh ah?' With sympathy for the put-upon male: ‘That kind, is she?' Mr Fenner withdrew into his private smog, savouring his home-made tobacco and the knowledge, I felt sure, that
his
wife wasn't one of that kind.

We went down the garden, Mrs Fenner, Maud and I, following a path trodden between tall grasses and poppies, and accompanied on our way by two pairs of butterflies, one pair cabbage, one, small tortoiseshell. Bees swerved about their business, grasshoppers chirped. The grasses tickled my bare legs.

It was a lovely way to go to the lav.

The privies stood in a row at the bottom of the garden, looking like bathing huts on a shore from which the sea had long since retreated. The one between the Fenners' and the Leaches', like the cottage of which it was a dependency, tottered in a state of dereliction, the roof stripped of its pantiles, the door hanging by a single hinge. Under the sagging lintel crowded several little clay cups of house martins' nests; and it was clear that a further colony of the birds was housed within, for the air was busy with the non-stop twitter of nestlings, and the tireless comings and goings of the parent birds.

When Mrs Fenner opened the door into our own kingdom I was delighted to discover that one pair, preferring privacy, it may be, or simply finding standing room only next door, had taken up residence in an angle of the Fenner lav. As we entered – all of us together! What new experience was in store? – a flash of black and white shot ahead of us like an arrow, and, in an instant, was on its way out again, back to the insect-rich outdoors.

The privy doors were not privy at all, beginning some eighteen inches above the ground, and ending at least as much below the lintel; in addition to which, each had an unglazed porthole, the shape of a playing-card club, gouged out of the centre. You could see that someone was in the Leaches' lav, which was the only one which was painted; spick and span like the polished black shoes and the grey socks with fancy clox which showed under the door.

‘Mr Leach,' said Mrs Fenner, making no effort to keep her voice down. ‘Known him to be there of a Sunday from dinner till tea.' The black shoes scuffed each other self-consciously. ‘You got to hand it to him, poor bugger. He do keep trying.'

New smells. Horrible new smells, but with such compensations they might have been flower fragrances. Not only a nest of real live birds to watch while you were doing your business, but company! Suddenly the whole boring business of evacuation was transformed: a social event, a lav party, as it might be a Christmas or a birthday one, for which you might send out invitations, with spaces to fill in the date and the times, and RSVP at the end. No stupid games like My Friend's Chair and Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Just you and two best friends – there were never more than two people you
really
wanted to invite, the rest were just make-weights, there to make up the numbers – sitting at peace with the world.

There were three holes in the wooden seat at Opposite the Cross Keys, three holes of different sizes – one for Daddy Bear, one for Mummy Bear, and one for Baby Bear. Marvellous! Though I couldn't help being glad that Baby Bear's – my – hole was at the other end of the seat from the birds' nest, where the wood was distinctly splodgy.

‘Mucky little bastards,' Mrs Fenner observed affectionately. She brushed some segments of regurgitated bluebottle on to the earth floor before pulling down her bloomers and getting on with it.

We didn't talk much. There was no need. The sense of companionship was all. I felt quite sorry for poor constipated Mr Leach in his grey socks and polished shoes stuck there two doors away, all on his own.

The porthole in the door was too high up for me, seated, to see anything but the sky. I sat happy and mindless until Mrs Fenner said, at exactly the right moment, ‘All good things have to come to an end. Pass us a bit o' paper, Sylvie, there's a good gal.'

Maud said it was time for my walk. I didn't know how this intelligence was revealed to her and did not dare to ask. Mrs Fenner, looking as if the very idea of a walk in St Awdry's was something novel, not to say barmy, demanded, ‘Walk? What bloody for?'

‘Sylvie needs the exercise. We can go round by the Swan, and up as far as the fields.'

‘Oh ah.' Mrs Fenner received the suggestion without enthusiasm. ‘Fields. What you want to go an' look at them fer?'

‘Oh, ma!' exclaimed her daughter, who, after seven years in the city, had evidently acquired some of the townee's chronic sentimentality about the countryside. ‘You know yourself it's nice up there.'

‘Nice for cows.' But Mrs Fenner came along cheerfully enough.

We walked in single file along the narrow pavement until, just before the public house, where the signpost said Norwich one way, Cromer the other, and nowhere at all up the little lane Maud intended us to follow, we came to the pond. That is, so I was told: I was expected to take the pond on trust. All you could actually see from the road was a tangle of rushes and yellow flags, hog bean and water forget-me-not.