The Dust That Falls from Dreams (24 page)

I
t was only the third time that Daniel had called by, and he had not yet rung the bell because a rowdy game of British bulldog was going on in the street, and he was watching it with fond memories of his own schooldays. A posse of ragged urchins had wandered up from Mottingham, and were using the pavements as Home, and the road as their battlefield. It had begun because one of them had found a tennis ball that must have come over the wall of one of the wealthy houses, and a tennis ball was exactly what one needed to start a game of British bulldog.

The children had stood with their legs wide apart in a big circle in the middle of the street, and the ball had been tossed into their midst. It went through the legs of a little girl wearing a crushed bonnet on her head, and much grime on her face, and so she was ‘it’.

To cries of ‘British Bulldog, one, two, three!’ a magnificent hurly-burly of rushing, grabbing and throwing to the ground began, in which knees got grazed, noses bled and torn clothes were rent yet further. The little girl had managed to catch a tall child with a wall eye, and the two of them had caught two more, until at last there was only one very fast girl left, who had no chance against twelve bulldogs all in a line.

She became the first bulldog of the next game, and was standing in the middle of the road ready to begin when a new AC Six hove into view. Its driver was wearing an expensive herringbone tweed coat, goggles and a deerstalker hat, and was clearly neither skilful nor experienced. The car lurched and staggered as he crashed it into the wrong gear and pressed down on the accelerator too much or too little. Daniel and the children watched it with fascination, and the fast girl who was the new bulldog ran quickly to join her friends.

Just as the vehicle was about to pass, it swerved out, and then
back again, mounting the kerb and sending two children spinning into the wall of The Grampians. The crack of a head hitting the wall was clearly audible above the screaming and the belated sound of the motor’s klaxon. The children began to wail and panic, running about and crashing into each other. The AC came to a halt twenty yards up the street, and the driver merely sat there, blinking and muttering. The car began to roll slowly backwards, and Daniel ran forward, leapt into it and engaged the handbrake.

The screaming had caused many doors to open, and, running back, Daniel saw Rosie and Ottilie coming out onto the steps of their house. He waved at them to come down.

The two women dealt with the children as best they could, fortunate to have had those years of nursing behind them. Daniel ran indoors to call Dr Scott and an ambulance, and then ran out again. He instructed the children to fetch mothers and fathers, anyone to whom the injured children might belong, and they scattered in the direction of Mottingham, like a small flock of ragged birds.

It was at this point that the driver of the car clambered out. Unsteadily he went round to the nearside and inspected the bumper. When Daniel realised that he could do nothing for the broken children that the sisters were not already doing, he came up beside the driver. The latter gestured towards the bumper. ‘Damned shame,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to get it straightened. Only had the damned thing for two weeks, and it’s dented already.’ He pulled a fox hunter’s pocket flask from his coat, took a swig and offered it to Daniel.

Daniel waved a hand in astonished refusal. The driver was a man in his forties, portly and prosperous, with the red-veined face and watery eyes of a drunk. Once he had evidently been handsome and virile, but he had clearly been unmanned by alcohol for quite some time.

‘Come with me,’ said Daniel, taking his arm.

‘Steady, old boy,’ said the drunk, as Daniel frogmarched him down to where the injured children lay.

‘I’m making a citizen’s arrest,’ said Daniel. ‘You do as I bloody well tell you, or I swear I’ll break your neck.’

Rosie looked up with tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t think this one’ll
Live,’ she said. Daniel looked down at the cracked skull that was oddly flattened on one side, with its caking of dark blood in the blond hair. He was a beautiful little boy, despite the dirt and poverty that had been his lot, and was no more than six years old. Tears flowed down his cheeks from bright speedwell-blue eyes that stared at nothing, and his mouth worked silently.

The little boy that Ottilie was tending was lying flat on his back, howling with pain, his fierce sobs seeming to echo from the walls of the houses. ‘Both legs broken,’ said Ottilie, when Daniel leaned down. ‘I don’t know if they’ll ever be straight.’

Daniel turned to the drunk and said fiercely, ‘One child dead and one maimed. Are you proud of yourself?’

‘Damned little hobbledehoys, fourpence a dozen. Would have grown up thieves. What about my bumper? That’s what I want to know. Doubt if I can get their mothers to pay for it. Probably haven’t got fathers. Too many damned brats, anyway.’

‘Pay for it?’ repeated Daniel, astonished.

‘Expensive things, motor cars,’ said the man.

By now several people had come out of their houses, or stopped in passing, and were as outraged as Daniel. ‘You are a drunk, and a murderer,’ he said.

‘Steady on,’ repeated the man. ‘Let’s try to keep things decent, eh?’

‘Decent? Decent?’ Daniel felt the rage rise up in him, hatred mixed with contempt, and instinct overtook him.

He took the man’s throat in his left hand, pulled his right fist back past his ear, and drove it straight into the drunkard’s face. There was an explosion of blood from the man’s nose, and he put his hands to his face. Daniel kicked his legs from under him, and he went down on the pavement.

Constable Dusty Miller appeared at that point.

In those days policemen were numerous and ubiquitous, and were able to summon other policemen by blowing vigorously on a whistle. Many was the mischievous child who possessed an Acme Thunderer, with which to decoy the police for the entertainment of their friends.

Dusty Miller had happened to be in the kitchen of The Grampians, drinking tea kindly supplied by Millicent and Cookie. When he had realised that there was a fracas on the street outside,
he had been faced with a dilemma: either to get there quickly and give himself away as a covert tea drinker in a forbidden kitchen, or to find a long way round that would save face, but possibly allow the fracas to get further out of hand.

He chose the latter course and ran down to the end of the garden, where he scrambled over the wall, turned right and sprinted round up the alleyway, appearing on the scene, breathless and red-faced, thirty seconds later, just in time to see Daniel felling the drunk.

‘Stand back! Stand back!’ he ordered, wearily resigning himself to having to intervene in a fight. It was the one thing he least liked to do. Keeping calm was impossible, and conquering one’s own fear never became any easier. Fortunately there was no fight. The crowd had gathered round Daniel and the fallen man, wondering with admiring horror what Daniel would do next.

‘What’s all this about?’ demanded Constable Miller, and Daniel gestured towards where the children lay by the wall.

‘One child almost certainly dead, and another with broken legs,’ said Daniel, panting, ‘because this cretin ran them down when he was drunk.’

The policeman hurried to where the children lay and knelt by them. ‘Oh my word,’ he said. ‘Has anyone gone for an ambulance?’

‘We have a telephone in the house,’ said Ottilie. ‘We’ve called for one. And Rosie and I were both with the VAD.’

‘Well, thank God for telephones,’ said Constable Miller. He got to his feet and turned to Daniel, who was flexing his fingers. ‘You were committing an assault, sir. You should know better than to take the law into your own hands. I ought to be arresting you.’

‘He got what was rightly comin’,’ said the cats’ meat man. ‘Poor little kids. He’s a feckin’ murderer, that’s what he is. No doubt about it.’

There was a murmur of agreement, and a respectable woman dressed in a fur coat and a hat with a prodigious feather sticking out of it said, ‘You can’t arrest him, Constable. There aren’t any witnesses.’

‘No witnesses?’ repeated the constable. ‘What? With all you lot here?’

‘We didn’t see nothing,’ said the gaslighter.

‘I saw it,’ said the policeman.

‘No, you didn’t,’ said the muffin man. ‘None of us saw sod all, including you.’

‘Help me, help,’ whimpered the drunk, and the policeman prodded him in the ribs with his boot. ‘You shut up,’ he said. ‘And get up.’ He took out his notebook. ‘I need names and addresses of all you lot who saw what happened when the kids got hit,’ he said. ‘And as for you, sir, I don’t care if you’re the King himself, you don’t take the law into your own hands. Do I make myself clear?’

Daniel nodded, feeling ashamed. He had not previously realised that he had so much anger and stress pent up inside. ‘I’m sorry, Constable,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I lost control.’

‘Well, sir, it’s understandable under the circumstances. We’ll let it pass, shall we?’

A motorised ambulance arrived. The drunk was led away by Dusty Miller, who propelled him along to the station with frequent prods in the small of the back, and gradually the little knot of people dispersed. Ottilie and Rosie insisted on going in the ambulance with the children, and were not resisted, since ambulancemen did not defy middle-class women who had the habit of command, and vital nursing experience to go with it. They came back two hours later with the news that the little ragged blond boy who looked like an angel had died an hour after admission. Millicent and Cookie cried in the kitchen, and the sisters wept in the drawing room. Daniel went for a walk at high speed, three times around the perimeter of the golf course. Upon his return he started up the AC and parked it in the driveway. Ottilie cut flowers from the garden and laid them on the front wall at the scene of the accident, and Mrs McCosh went to her bedroom. The whole thing had reminded her too greatly of that awful day in Folkestone, when she had seen the child’s severed head looking up at her from a doorstep.

That night, having sobbed again over the death of the boy, Rosie lay in bed clutching her plaster statue of the Virgin, thinking about what Daniel had done. She had found his violence frightening and repulsive, but completely understandable. She had
watched it with fascination, and done nothing to stop it. Despite herself, she could not help but admire his moral outrage, his energy and strength. She thought that for him there must have been some catharsis after so many years of strain. She realised that she hated that driver as much as Daniel must have done, and found herself hoping that something a lot worse than a broken nose would happen to him. ‘Sometimes I’m not really a very good Christian,’ she thought, and she fell asleep wondering if Ash or Hutch would have punched the drunk.

R
osie went down to the Tarn to sit on her own and think about things, and on the way home she heard a pathetic mewing as she passed one of the houses near the church. At first she could not locate it, but when she peered over the low wall, she saw a hessian bag in the darkness between the wall and the laurel hedge. It was too far to reach by bending over, and she was reluctant to go into a stranger’s driveway.

She looked around hastily, saw nobody, put her bag down and, without thought to her clothes, clambered onto the wall. By lying along it, she could just reach down a hand and lift the bag out. She just had it in her right hand, when a voice said, ‘Are you all right, miss?’

Rosie hastily got off the wall, very abashed, and dusted the moss and grit off her front. ‘It’s all right, Constable,’ she said, looking up. ‘I was just rescuing these kittens.’

‘Kittens, eh?’ repeated Dusty Miller. ‘Let’s have a look, then.’

Rosie struggled with the knot in the neck of the bag, and gave up. ‘You have a try,’ she said, handing it to him.

Dusty Miller could not untie it either, so he handed the bag back to Rosie and fetched his penknife from his pocket. He cut the bag as Rosie held it, and said, ‘What have we got here, then?’

He took the two tiny creatures out and held one in each hand, showing them to Rosie. Their eyes were only just open and their ears still flat on their heads. There was a ginger-and-white short-hair, and a silver tabby that was clearly going to be long-haired.

‘I just don’t know how people can be so cruel,’ said Rosie. ‘They’re so sweet. How can anyone just throw them away and leave them to die?’

‘I’ve been a bobby for ten years,’ said Dusty Miller. ‘There’s no limit to human wickedness, miss, believe me. There’s nothing some folk won’t do for sixpence.’

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Rosie.

‘One for you and one for me,’ said the policeman. ‘We need a new mouser down at the nick. The old one’s got past bothering.’

‘My mother’ll kill me,’ said Rosie. ‘I’m always coming home with cats. We do find homes for them, though.’

Constable Miller gave them to Rosie and took a look under their tails. ‘One boy and one girl,’ he announced. ‘What do you fancy, miss?’

‘I like the ginger,’ she replied. ‘That must be the boy, I assume.’

‘I’ll have the girl, then. I expect we’ll call her Fluffy.’

Rosie smiled and said, ‘Constable, don’t you think you should go for something more original?’

‘Original, miss? What’s the point? The cat don’t know any better, do she?’

He tucked the tabby into the pocket of his uniform, and hurried back to the station, leaving Rosie to carry hers in her cupped hands back to The Grampians.

Mrs McCosh was less delighted. ‘Another kitten? My dear, this is too much. Why do you keep coming home with kittens? You brought back five once. The mayhem! It was like being overrun with tiny mad horses, all practising for the Grand National.’

‘Rosie’s very serendipitous when it comes to kittens,’ said Sophie. ‘The rest of us never find any. Do let’s call it Caractacus.’

‘Caractacus?’ repeated Mrs McCosh. ‘Whatever for?’

‘It’s full of cat sounds. There are three “a”s and three “c”s, and a “t”, and it even rhymes with “puss”. Couldn’t be better.’

‘It’ll just end up being called Cracky or Cracker,’ declared Mrs McCosh. ‘A cat needs a name with dignity, with
cachet
. We should call it Prince.’

‘Oh, Mother,’ cried Rosie, ‘that’s a dog’s name!’

‘Let’s call it Rover then,’ suggested Sophie, ‘and teach it to bark. It could be Eltham’s premier guard cat.’

‘I perceive I am outnumbered as usual,’ said Mrs McCosh.

‘No one’s to call it Ginger,’ said Rosie.