Opposite the Cross Keys (9 page)

‘Can't we go closer and take a look?'

No, we could not. Closer was dangerous. One Saturday night a couple of years ago, after some louts in the Swan old enough to know better had put away more beer than was good for them, they had gone outside and turned the signpost round, so that the sign which said to Norwich pointed straight into the bog. And a young man and a girl in an Austin saloon, who had also drink taken, had driven off the road, crashed through the bulrushes, and ended up in the pond.

Or the car had, anyway.

Mrs Fenner finished, ‘Last summer, when we had all that dry weather, you could just see the roof showing. They never did get it out. Tin't the water, you see, it's the mud. Goes down to Australia. Sucked it in before any one of the great gowks got enough wits together to go for a rope.'

‘But the young man and the girl –' The lovely secret place had become suddenly full of dread.

‘Don't worry. They wasn't as drunk as all that. Jumped clear, both on ' em, afore the car hit the water. All they needed was a good bath.'

But I had seen the look Maud gave her mother over my head. Was I being fobbed off? Were the young man and his girl still sitting there in the car, under the still, secret water, packed solid with mud, the young man's hands still clutching the steering wheel?

‘There you go again,' said Maud, interpreting my expression with her usual accuracy. ‘Ask your brother Alfred if you don't believe what my ma just said. That Eric Woods he knows, the one that plays the piano, he knows the two of 'em. So no nightmares, young miss, if you know what's good for you!'

‘So why did you look at your mother like that?'

‘Like what? I got to ask your permission, now, how I look at my ma?'

I persisted. ‘As if there was something you didn't want me to know.'

‘Couldn't be that, could it? You who know everything!'

Maud's tone was jeering, but again I sensed an underlying unease. Suddenly I knew without being told that Charlie had been one of the great gowks old enough to know better.

I also knew that I must never say that I knew.

My fears lifted, leaving only a residual regret. The pond had become less doomful, but also less interesting. A sudden skitter and splash made us all three jump, until we saw it was only a pair of mallards taking off from the hidden water.

Nobody in St Awdry's ever took a walk. In a world geared to the plough, the hoe, to cows to be brought in for milking, putting one foot in front of the other for pleasure was a daft idea if ever they heard one. There seemed to be hardly anybody but us alive in the village. At the side of one of the cottages which straggled along the unmetalled lane, a boy was looking for a bicycle puncture, moving the inner tube round in a basin of water, watching for bubbles. A black and tan dog, rolling on its back in the sandy roadway to get rid of its fleas, lifted its head to see who was coming along, sensed no threat, and went back to its rough and ready grooming. In a front garden a woman with a net over her hair and wearing a black cardigan in spite of the heat was cutting sweet williams.

‘Arternoon!' Mrs Fenner greeted her politely, receiving in return what might or might not have been a nod.

‘Stuck-up bit o' bacon!' remarked Mrs Fenner when we were past, but not sufficiently past not to be overheard. ‘Acts like she's the Queen o' Sheba on account she used to work in the kitchen at Sandringham. Just because King Edward, bless him, once pinched it on the back stairs, don't mean we all got to bow down an' kiss her arse.'

The houses petered out and the fields began, boring, exactly as Mrs Fenner had intimated. There did seem to be an unnecessary amount of green in the world.

Mrs Fenner took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from her face. ‘How long's this bloody walk goin' on?' she wanted to know.

Maud didn't answer. As ever, she knew what she was about. She led the way across the first field and a second, to a stile between hawthorn hedges where, after a quick survey of what lay beyond, she turned and waited for us to catch up. She was looking very pleased with herself.

‘Get an eyeful o' that,' she commanded, when we arrived, hot and bothered. ‘The same like always, year after year ever since I was Sylvie's age,
and
younger.'

The third field was less green than gold. Not the common gold of buttercups, but an orange shimmer, a gold that seemed to pulsate in the hot sun, that
was
the sun. The air was good enough to eat, heavy with the fragrance of apricots.

‘Cowslips,' Maud instructed me, as she helped me over the stile. ‘Thought you might like to take a few back to your ma.'

A few! Surrounded by that sweet-scented treasure I ran about like one possessed. The stems yielded easily, a little juice exuding from the broken ends, enough to make my fingers sticky. I picked cowslips until I could hold no more, until I dropped as many as I picked, and still I went on picking.

Maud and her mother watched me unmoving, leaning on the stile side by side and apparently uninfected by my manic greed. Only when I ran to them and gave Maud my gatherings to hold, preliminary to beginning all over again, did she yank me back with a hand on the skirt of my dress.

‘Leave some for somebody else, greedy guts!' She thrust the flowers under her mother's nose. ‘Smell nice, don't they?'

I said, ‘They smell of apricots.'

‘Don't talk daft!' said Maud. Then, ‘What do
you
say, ma?'

Mrs Fenner sniffed judiciously before pronouncing.

‘Armpits? No. Tripe an' onions? No.' She buried her nose so deep in the flowers that golden pollen flecked her rosy cheeks. Then, with a radiant smile of recognition, ‘Cowslips! Tha's what they smell like. Cowslips!'

How happy I was!

Mrs Fenner took a penknife and a piece of string out of her pocket, and sat down on the step of the stile. ‘Gimme those.' Whilst I watched anxiously, afraid she was about to set all my effort at naught, she divided up the big bunch of cowslips into smaller bunches, cut some stems so short there was little left but the nodding flowerets, left others as I had picked them. She saw my eyes on her and sent me to an oak tree which grew in the hedge by the ditch, to see if I could find a nice little pincushion of moss, not too big, not too small, and no bloody bugs in it either.

I found the moss without difficulty. When I brought it back, she rammed the bright green pad into the heart of the cowslips; knotted the string, cut it, made a loop big enough to get your hand through in the piece that was left: felt for a hairpin in her hair to make a kind of anchorage at the other end. A lock of hair plopped down on her neck, which made us all laugh, and made me feel suddenly sure that my cowslips were going to be all right after all.

‘Ma!' Maud exclaimed, her voice vibrant with love. ‘You are a one!'

Mrs Fenner had made a cowslip ball, a small sun brought down to earth. She slipped the loop of string over my wrist. Its beauty was beyond words and I bore it back to Opposite the Cross Keys, myself made beautiful by the bearing of it.

When we were back in the scullery, Mrs Fenner made me dunk the ball in the bucket of water, just once, and then she hung it up to drain on a nail over the range, the excess water puddling the floor. Maud brought the kettle in from the living-room and filled it from the same bucket, taking no account of the ants and other small insects which were floating there. The difference between Maud's Salham St Awdry and her Norwich standards of hygiene enchanted me.

While she cut great doorsteps of bread and marge as against the paper-thin bread and butter for which my mother's tea table was justly famed, I slipped out of the back door and down to the privies. I didn't need to go, and if I had needed to, I would have held it in until I had company. I just wanted to see if Mr Leach's shoes and socks were still there.

They were; only just at that moment a woman came out of the Leaches' cottage and shouted ‘Bert!' in a voice that shattered the sweet contentment of the place, the grasses, the nodding poppies. A moment later, a man of medium size, dressed in grey trousers, a white, long-sleeved shirt and a black, grey and red-striped tie that went well with the shoes and the socks with the fancy clox, came out of the Leach privy and hurried up the path. He was youngish, I thought – so far as, in my judgement, any grown-up was anything but bowed under the weight of years – even though the hair on the top of his head was thinning. His rounded shoulders, his nose advancing, chin retreating, gave him a sad and fretful look. He did not look as if he had accomplished much, down at the lav or anywhere else.

I wished I had the nerve to tell him about senna pods, which May Bowden swore by. Or that I were like Mrs Fenner who, I felt, would certainly have called out, in her rich, warm voice, ‘Better luck next time, bor!' As it was, we both saw and pretended not to see each other.

At tea I sat on the sofa, underneath the photographs of the two old men. It was uncomfortable to the point of agony. How could horses, who looked so smooth and glossy, be so prickly when made up into furniture? Perhaps it was their way of taking revenge.

Tears came into my eyes – not of pain, but pride. Now, I kidded myself, munching the clodhopper bread, drinking the horrible sweet tea with a dead ant, which I went out of my way to swallow, floating in the cup, my thighs and calves chafed, I too knew what it was to be poor. It seemed to me an accomplishment for which I deserved praise, like mastering the present tense of
être. Je suis
poor,
tu es
poor,
il est
poor,
elle est
poor. It wasn't until years later, when my father, out of the blue, happened to mention that Salham St Awdry had once been known for its horsehair weaving, that up to the Great War there had been between forty and fifty horsehair weavers working in the village, that I knew for certain what I had known instinctively ever since that first day at Opposite the Cross Keys: that St Awdry's was the place where they had manufactured poverty, weaving it thread by thread, warp and woof, on a loom.

Tom came in for his tea full of a secret – not so secret – glee. I immediately guessed, by the way he kept smiling at me, winking and nodding, that he had got me a toad, only I wasn't supposed to know. It was to be a lovely surprise. With conspiratorial glee he patted the right pocket of his greatcoat, to let me know where the surprise was located.

Tom ate his bread and marge and drank his tea with an enjoyment that involved his whole body; twisting about as he chewed, smacking his lips loudly and moving the bread round his mouth as if he wished to present it, another lovely surprise, to every nook and corner of his digestive system. Ellie put away just as much, but did it in mean little nibbles, as if she only ate the stuff because she had to, to keep body and soul together. Perhaps, I don't know, she was acting the lady for my benefit.

Mr Fenner chose not to come to the table. Maud took his tea and bread and marge over to where he sat, still crowned with smoke, in the rocking chair. He put the tea on the mantelshelf while he ate the bread and drew on his pipe alternately. When he had finished the bread he spat a hissing gob of phlegm into the fire, knocked out his pipe, and settled down to his cup of tea.

‘Maud gal –' he smiled at his daughter when she came to relieve him of the empty cup –‘I reckon King George hisself weren't served a better cup 'n that.'

‘Speakin' of royalty,' said Mrs Fenner, who had taken her chair over to the window – the cars were beginning to come back from the coast, and she enjoyed watching them go by – ‘we saw her Ladyship o' Sandringham up the lane. Couldn't dirty her lips wi' passing the time of day with the likes of us, o' course.'

‘She in't so dusty, Ma.' Mr Fenner sat back comfortably, surveying his family with affectionate satisfaction. ‘Can't all be lucky like us. Tin't her fault she's such a misery, hubby done a bunk, and young Gordon on the War Memorial, missing.'

‘I'd go missing if all I had to come back to was a ma like her,' Mrs Fenner insisted, unrepentant. ‘No flies on that Gordon. Holed up over there wi' some Mamselle from Armentières, I shouldn't be surprised.'

‘Ma!' cried Maud. It seemed to be an expression she felt called upon to use often, invariably in a tone of admiration mingled with laughing reproof. ‘You
are
a one!'

Tom unbuttoned the pocket of his army greatcoat with exaggerated care, and took out the toad. He held it out over the table so that I could get a good look at it, but holding on to it firmly, not inviting me to take it into my own hands.

I was grateful for that because, although the last thing I wanted to do was hurt Tom's feelings, I was uncertain how I felt about toads. I wasn't exactly afraid of them, but I wasn't exactly unafraid either.

Because I could see that was what Tom expected of me, I exclaimed with enthusiasm, ‘A toad!'

‘I said I'd get you one, didn't I?' Tom bounced up and down in his seat, his angelic, unfinished face wreathed in smiles.

‘And you did.' Seeing how pleased with me Maud was looking, I added, in my best little-girl voice, ‘You
are
kind!'

Tom, red with pleasure, said that the toad's name was Pillow. I looked at Pillow and Pillow looked back at me with such bright-eyed trustfulness that I was quite won over: or would have been, if, at that moment, it hadn't needed to blink. A thin, semi-transparent membrane flicked down over the eyes and up again in a way to make the blood run cold.

‘Hello, Pillow,' I managed nevertheless.

‘Go on – stroke it,' Tom commanded, and when I shrank away, unable to disguise my aversion, he stroked the toad's head himself with one of his large, scarred hands. The little creature all but purred, its eyes rolling upward in ecstasy.

It looked so absurd that I had to laugh, and, laughing, came to terms with the alien life-form. I had to have a go myself. The toad's skin, I was thankful to find, was dry and cool to the touch, an agreeable roughness.