The Peppermint Pig (5 page)

‘I’m not,’ Mother said. ‘Goodness me!’ But her voice shook and when she turned and grabbed Poll and held her pressed close, Poll could hear her breath creaking unevenly through her boned bodice. She cried a little, herself, in sympathy, until Mother said, ‘There, that’s enough. Turn off the waterworks now and don’t let your father know
we’ve both been so silly. He’s got enough to bear, leaving us all, without you and me making things harder with a lot of old misery. So let’s put a good face on it and send him off happy.’

CHAPTER THREE

T
HE LITTLE FRONT
sitting-room of the cottage was furnished with what was left of their London house. Most of the valuable things had been sold, the grandfather clock, and the round walnut table, and the pretty Chippendale chairs, but the bookcase with the brass inlay and the secret drawer that flew open when you pressed a knob at the side was brought down to Norfolk, and Mother’s treadle sewing machine, and the old leather sofa that had been kept in the kitchen in London because it was too shabby for the parlour. ‘We’ll have it under the window,’ Mother said. ‘It’ll do as a lookout post.’

The cottages had long thin gardens at the back; their front doors opened on to the Market Square. Kneeling on the slippery sofa was rather like having a permanent seat at the theatre because something
was always happening outside the window: people going to shop, or to church, or to the bakehouse with pies to bake for dinner; farm carts and gipsy carts passing; fox hounds off to the meet; the Salvation Army band playing at least twice a week; the Town Crier, dressed in his robes and calling ‘Oyez, Oyez’ before he cried out his message.

The week after Christmas, a man with his dancing bear appeared in the Square. Someone had given the bear beer to drink and he stood on his hind legs, waving his great black head and swaying from side to side like a drunken sailor. Lily said it was cruel to give a poor bear alcohol, but Poll and Theo thought he seemed happy enough and went outside to take a closer look.

As they slammed their front door, the station cab drew up and a short, fat man got out of it. Poll glanced at him briefly and ran round the back of the cab. Theo caught hold of her pinafore. He whispered, ‘Poll, who’s that man?’

She answered absently, watching the bear who had little red eyes and long, cruel-looking claws like steel rakes, ‘I don’t know. Yes, I do. It’s Old Rowland, I think. Oh, I am glad he’s wearing a muzzle!’

Theo said, ‘
What
?’ and she laughed. ‘I mean the bear, silly!’

‘Poll!’ He sounded so shocked that she dragged her eyes away from the bear. Theo’s face had gone white. He said, ‘Go and talk to him, Poll. I’ll warn Mother,’
and was off like a shot round the end of the terrace of cottages, to go in the back way.

Poll looked after him, puzzled. But she had never been shy and Old Rowland had once given her sixpence. The cab had moved off and she went up to him, thinking that if she smiled at him nicely, he might give her sixpence again. If he did, she would give it to the man with the bear when he came round with his cap.

She said, ‘Hallo, Mr Rowland,’ and he looked down at her, his fat neck rolling in red, bristly folds over his collar. Something about him was different but she couldn’t think what. He said, ‘Why, it’s James’s little maid, isn’t it? Pretty-Poll.’

She smiled, wondering if he would remember that the last time he had called her Pretty-Poll he had given her sixpence, but he only shook his head, sighing as if the sight of her had made him feel sad, and said, ‘Is your Mother in?’

The front door opened. Mother stood there, rather flushed, one hand touching her hair. Old Rowland said, ‘May I come in, Mrs Greengrass?’ He had taken his hat off and was holding it in front of him, looking humble.

Mother nodded and stepped back. She said, ‘Poll, take Mr Rowland into the front room while I make tea.’

Old Rowland stood aside to let Poll go first through the door as if she were a lady. This embarrassed her
and she stood awkwardly on one leg, rubbing an itchy chilblain on the back of her calf with the toe of her boot. Old Rowland looked round the room, then at Poll. He said, ‘Shall we look out of the window? It’s a long time since I’ve seen a dancing bear.’

He stood beside Poll while she knelt on the sofa and pressed her nose against the cold glass. The bear was on four legs now, shambling beside his owner who was going round with his cap. The audience was dwindling rapidly. Poll said, ‘I do think it’s mean of people to go away without paying, don’t you?’

Old Rowland didn’t take the hint. Instead he sighed as he had done before and said, ‘Do you like living here, Pretty-Poll?’ and she knew what was different about him: he had been such a jolly man the last time she had seen him and now he looked like a sad one.

She said, because it was polite to try and cheer up visitors when they were miserable, ‘Oh yes, we all do, even Lily. She likes being next door with Aunt Sarah because she can get on with her homework without being bothered by Theo and me. And I think it’s more fun than living in London, especially now it’s turned cold. Aunt Harry says, soon as the ice holds, she’ll take us skating.’

He looked at her stupidly. ‘Don’t you miss your father?’

This was such a silly question she wasn’t sure how to answer. Anyone would miss their father if he had
gone to America, surely Old Rowland knew that? ‘Well,’ she said cautiously, ‘he hasn’t been gone very long.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I suppose not.’

Mother came in with the tray. She had borrowed Aunt Sarah’s best Lowestoft china. She said, ‘Would you like something to eat, Mr Rowland? You must be hungry after your journey from London.’

She put the tray down on a table that had escaped being sold because one leg was rickety and smiled at him very stiffly and coldly.

Old Rowland gave one of his heavy sighs. ‘When you know what I’ve come to say, Mrs Greengrass, you may not want to offer me anything. Trouble is, I hardly know how to begin…’

Mother said, ‘Please sit down first, then. I think
that
chair will hold you. I’m afraid we’re not quite straight yet, we’re still waiting for the rest of our furniture.’ She gave Poll a sharp look, warning her not to deny this, and added, ‘Perhaps it will save time, Mr Rowland, if I say at once that I know what you’ve come to tell me, and that I am glad about it, even if it’s too late to be of much use, of course.’

He shook his head and his drooping jowls quivered. ‘James knew the truth all along, did he?
I
should have known! Mrs Greengrass, why didn’t he tell me my son was a thief? And worse – that he’d let your good man take the blame?’

He was blowing and puffing as if he had been
running a race. If he had not been so old, Poll might have thought he was going to cry. Mother’s stiff look softened and she moved quickly towards him, hand outstretched, as if he were one of her children in trouble. She said, ‘Oh, you poor man, he wanted to spare you, what else?’ Old Rowland took her hands and bowed his head over them. She looked at Poll over his bent head. ‘You go and find Theo.’

Poll went. She closed the door and waited outside for a minute but she couldn’t hear anything clearly, only her mother’s voice rising and falling in a gentle, comforting murmur and then a strange, heaving, gasping sound that was Old Rowland crying. Poll felt the hot blood come up in her face and she ran into the kitchen, through the scullery and out into the garden, so fast that her cheeks shook.

Theo wasn’t in their garden. Poll ran to the end, slipping on the iced-up puddles in the dirt path, looked through the hedge and saw him by Aunt Sarah’s summer house, crouched on his haunches and scrabbling beneath it. She banged open the wooden gate between the two gardens and shouted, ‘What are you doing?’

Theo sat back on his heels. His blue eyes were glittering and his fair curls were damp on his forehead. He whispered, ‘Getting rid of the evidence.’

‘What do you mean?’

Aunt Sarah’s summer house, a little room built for
her to be private in, with a desk and a bed and a fireplace in one corner, was raised from the ground on brick blocks. Theo pushed earth underneath and banged it flat with his hand. He said, ‘That gold leaf. Just in case that’s what he’s come for.’

‘I don’t think it is.’ Poll drew a deep breath and said, amazed, ‘He’s just standing there
crying
!’

Theo didn’t appear to have heard her. He said, ‘I had to bury it there because the ground’s frozen up everywhere else. I didn’t know what to do at first. I mean, he might have wanted to search the house, mightn’t he, to look for the gold Dad had taken? Then I remembered the Swineherd.’ Theo stood up, brushing dirt from his knees. ‘You know, I expect that’s what really happened in that old story. It wasn’t fairy gold that was found, but real gold that was stolen by someone and hidden. Perhaps the Swineherd stole it himself and then wondered how he could possibly explain to his neighbours why he’d got rich so quickly. So he thought up that mad tale about a monk coming to him in a dream and telling him that if he dug under the oak tree he’d never be poor any longer. The Swineherd spread this around for a bit until everyone got used to the idea, then simply produced the gold that
he’d
buried and pretended his dream had come true!’

Theo pushed his hair back and looked very pleased with himself. ‘Clever when you think of it, really! Did you say Old Rowland was crying?’

Poll nodded, bewildered.

‘Whatever for?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Didn’t you listen?’

‘Only for a bit. Mother said she knew why he’d come. Then
he
said, why hadn’t Father told him? About young Rowland, that is.’

She stopped. It was clear in her head that Father had been brave and kind and too fond of Old Rowland to want him to know that his only son was a thief, but when she wanted to put this into words she began to feel muddled: she was sure there was something more to what had happened than that. It was rather as if there were a missing piece of a puzzle locked away in a drawer at the back of her mind and she had somehow mislaid the key to it. ‘It was nothing to do with your old tin of gold, anyway,’ she said scornfully.

‘I don’t see how you can be so sure,’ Theo said. They had been too busy moving house to make cards this Christmas and he had kept the tin of gold leaf in his toy box. When Old Rowland appeared it was the first thing Theo thought of and he had rushed upstairs, sick with terror, to find it and hide it. Now he had buried it safely his fear was fading fast like a bad dream in daylight, but he had enjoyed the feeling of acting so quickly and bravely and was reluctant to admit it hadn’t been necessary. He said, arguing with himself as much as with Poll, ‘After all, there was no
need for Dad to go away if he didn’t feel just a bit guilty about
something.’

‘You said he wanted to go to America,’ Poll reminded him. ‘He wanted an adventure, you said.’

‘I know I said that. And I think that he did. I know
I
wouldn’t want to stay stuck in the same place all my life. But it’s not enough of a reason for leaving his job like he did. I mean, it just isn’t
enough
…’ He struggled with the impossibility of making clear what he meant, gave up, and rounded on Poll. ‘You ought to have
listened
.’

She stuck her nose in the air. ‘Eavesdropping’s wrong.’

‘Oh don’t be a prig! How else can we find out what’s happening? Grown-ups only ever tell you part of a thing, you know that. What they think suitable. And it’s no good at all
asking
. Not Mother, because it’ll only upset her to think about Father, and if Lily and George know more than we do they’d never tell us, and Aunt Sarah would just pretend she’d not heard what we said, and Aunt Harry…’

‘Do shut up,’ Poll said. ‘Is Dad coming back? That’s all I want to know, really.’

He looked at her, seeing her mouth turning down at the corners, not miserably, but in the mulish way that had always got her into trouble at school and sometimes made even the kindest of people call her stubborn and wilful, and knew that she had suddenly grown bored with all this talk about something she
couldn’t quite understand and that if he went on about it she would fly into one of her rages.

He said, quickly, ‘Of course he will. If you’re thinking about what that horrible woman said, what does she know about it? That horrible Bugg!’

This made her giggle as he had known that it would. ‘She walks like a caterpillar, did you see that? Like this, look…’

She went round the side of the summer house, wriggling her shoulders and bottom and snaking her head about, looking so strange that Aunt Harriet, coming up the path with an armful of coats and scarves, stopped and stared. ‘What are you doing, child?’

‘I’m being a caterpillar,’ Poll said with her sweetest smile. ‘A beastly caterpillar-bug.’

Aunt Harriet beamed at what seemed to her childish nonsense. ‘Are you, dear? Well, stop it now and get your things on, we’ve all been looking for you and the others have given up and gone on ahead with Aunt Sarah. Everyone says the ice is thick enough now at Eel’s Pit.’

It was the first time that winter. The weather, so mild up to Christmas, had become in the last week what grown-ups called ‘worse’ and the children had been waiting hopefully, looking at the windows when they woke in the morning to see if they were still frosted over and testing the ponds every day. Now half the
Town was out on Eel’s Pit, sliding or skating, dogs barking wildly, toddlers squealing as they clung to their mothers or bumped down on their well-padded bottoms. Poll and Theo saw George, staggering round like a lunatic clown on some old skates of Father’s and Lily, on new skates Aunt Sarah had bought her, was pushing a chair uncertainly over the ice.

‘Pity you two haven’t got skates,’ Aunt Harriet said. ‘Not worth it while you’re still growing. Still, you can have fun on the slides.’

She put her own skates on. As soon as she stood up, she was surrounded by little girls from her class at school, bundled up gnomes with knitted hats and red cheeks, shouting, ‘Miss Harry, Miss Harry, take me…’ She laughed and went sailing away like a great heavy bird, pulling a sliding child in each hand, the others running and slipping and screaming behind her. The wind blew her long skirts and lifted her dark mannish hat until it stood on its pins in a vertical halo.