Opposite the Cross Keys Page 5

  ‘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 dwile1 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.

  The room to which we returned still smelled awful; probably, after my contribution, worse than before. But it no longer signified. I was immune, initiated. I came in from the ope
n air without even having to catch my breath.

  The room, as I now saw, was dirty. Not, be it said, ‘dirty’ uttered as a moral judgment, but purely as a style of interior decoration. With a father who was an architect manqué I had, even at that age, come to know a lot about architecture and household furnishings. I knew about round Norman arches and pointed Gothic ones. I could recognize Jacobean and Palladian and Victorian and point out the differences between them.

  Now, with an instant and instinctive understanding, I added to my infant expertise a style in which my father had neglected to instruct me, though its characteristics, once identified, were as unmistakable as any Regency striped satin, or the marble and ormolu of Louis Quatorze.

  It was called Poverty.

  The room was dirty because, as I was later to discover for myself, the fire of coal dust which burned day-long in the mean little grate smoked when the wind was in any direction. When there was no wind, it stopped smoking but instead, every few minutes, with the regularity of a striking clock telling the quarters, let out a fart of pure sulphur. When that happened, Gyp, the smelly old mongrel who spent most of his day stretched out on the rag rug in front of the hearth, would raise his head, growl petulantly, and fart back before sinking afresh into his geriatric trance.

  The walls of the room, as I have already mentioned, were covered with a wallpaper which had a pattern of baskets of roses and lilacs set between panels of trellis where small birds perched, their tails cocked, their throats opened wide in song. The trouble was that the walls, full of strange bumps and hollows, were not really suitable for papering, and the roses and lilacs, the trellises and songbirds, flapped loosely over large areas, or else curled up at the seams. It could have been that the dirt acted as a kind of adhesive, for otherwise it was hard to understand what kept the paper up at all. As for its original coloration, that could only be guessed at, for all was now reduced to a uniform khaki, except over the fireplace, where it had turned coal black.

  The low ceiling – once, at a guess, distempered white – was a paler shade of khaki, except for a ring of dense brown sited over the table which took up a good part of the room. Until I found out that this was caused by the oily deposit which ascended from the paraffin lamp which was the sole lighting, the circle appeared to me mysterious and frightening. When I came to know that room after dark, its daytime Poverty style converted into a velvety richness which enfolded everything except for the people seated round the table, their faces lovely in the lovely lamplight, it seemed even more mysterious, a sign planted on the ceiling as it might be a rainbow: a promise of grace.

  The furniture at Opposite the Cross Keys matched the décor with an exactness to gladden the heart of the perfectionist. Apart from the sofa and the table, it consisted of a number of kitchen chairs, an old rocking chair which had long ceased to rock, and a high chest of drawers made of some yellowish wood. It had knobs, of which several were missing, instead of handles, and three bun feet, the place of the missing fourth being taken by a small pile of Old Moore’s Almanacs. The mantelshelf was draped with a swag of green plush finished off with bobbles, every fold heavy with enough coal dust to bank up the fire for the night.

  As for what are known in the trade as decorative items, these consisted of a pair of green glass vases painted with a design of a pierrot and a pierrette, and, in the centre of the mantelshelf, a model of a WC in white ceramic with, on the open lid, the legend: When you’re passing, do drop in. Variously disposed about the walls were several out-of-date calendars displaying pictures, mostly of simpering children holding simpering cats and dogs. The only other pictures were the two large photographs over the sofa.

  There were three people in the room I had not met before.

  Mr Fenner sat in the rocking chair reading Old Moore’s Almanac. He was a small man with blue eyes and a lively look almost eclipsed by a wide-brimmed trilby hat, black but so misused by time as to look, in the dim light, greenishly iridescent. When Maud brought me over to him, he said, without waiting for an introduction, ‘I heard a lot about you, gal.’

  Good or bad? I longed to ask, but didn’t dare.

  Mr Fenner poked a finger at the open page of his Almanac and went on without waiting for me to say anything.

  ‘Ma’s always on about how you read her the paper a treat. What you make o’ that, then? There!’ Handing me the Old Moore’s with another poke to make sure I knew where to look.

  Though the sight of his black-nailed forefinger distracted me, the words themselves presented no especial difficulties: I had been reading since I was four.

  ‘“May 25th to 27th,”’ I read aloud. ‘“An explosion on board a large passenger ship will result in its sinking with considerable loss of life. A Welsh climber will break all records for –’”

  ‘Bugger the rest,’ said Mr Fenner, which I took to be instructions to stop. He took his Almanac back. ‘What you say to that? I never heard o’ no ship goin’ down in May. An’ now we’re well into June. You see anything in them papers o’ yours?’

  I shook my head. I had seen nothing. Mr Fenner observed gloomily, ‘Never knew Old Moore to get it wrong afore.’

  ‘It doesn’t say an English ship,’ I pointed out, trying hard to be helpful. ‘They might not bother with putting foreign ships in the paper.’ And indeed Mr Fenner brightened up considerably. Jolly little puckers appeared at the corners of his eyes.

  He reached up to the mantelshelf and selected a clay pipe from among a number lying there. It was hardly used, with only a small stain of yellow down one side.

  He thrust it towards me.

  ‘You know how to blow bubbles? There’s something for you to blow bubbles with.’

  ‘After she’s had her dinner!’ Maud peremptorily interposed a hand, confiscating the gift, which she placed on top of the chest of drawers. But I could see she was pleased I had hit it off with her father.

  Ellie Fenner, in a discontented voice, from the other side of the room, asked, ‘You forget my bonbons?’

  ‘When do I ever forget your bonbons?’ answered Maud, in a tone from which I immediately deduced that, bonbons or no bonbons, Ellie Fenner and I were destined to be rivals, if not outright enemies.

  In a sense we were that already, before we had ever met. Every Saturday, on the Market Place, Maud paid out fourpence for a quarter of cream bonbons, which were brown, sausage-shaped sweets rolled in something white – icing sugar, perhaps, or ground rice. I never did know exactly what, because I was strictly forbidden to eat any of the candies piled up in gorgeous abundance on the Market sweet stalls. ‘Flies!’ Maud would pronounce, if the suggestion was made that a pennyworth of jujubes or pear drops would not come amiss. ‘Germs!’

  Yet there was Maud herself, Saturday after Saturday, buying her quarter of cream bonbons regular as clockwork! Why? For Ellie, I was told: for Ellie, the beautiful sister, who specially needed them, and the Market Place was the only place you could get them. I was given the impression they were vaguely medicinal, and that when Maud bought Ellie’s weekly supply it was the equivalent of going to Boots the Chemists and getting a prescription filled.

  When Ellie spoke, therefore, I was not surprised to see Maud open her handbag and take out the bag which contained the sweets. I expected her to put it on top of the chest of drawers next to my clay pipe. ‘Not before dinner!’

  Instead, to my chagrin, she handed the bag over with the kind of smile I hated to see her wasting on others. Ellie snatched it without so much as a thank you, peered inside as if seeking a particular cream bonbon, and finally settled on one which to all outward view differed in no way from its fellows. This, to my amazement, she did not pop into her little round mouth for a suck and a chew, as I, salivating jealously, had expected, but – with the aid of a small hand mirror which she produced from somewhere – proceeded to rub vigorously over her cheeks and up and down her pudgy nose. It took a little while to realize that Maud’s fourpennyworth was the snip of the week: not only sweets but face powder.
It took three of them to coat Ellie’s face and neck to her satisfaction, after which the de-powdered sweets were returned to the bag to await their final ingestion.

  It might have been expected that, unsympathetic as I was from the start to the very idea of the lovely Ellie, the belle of Salham St Awdry, I would have been cockahoop to discover there was no such animal, only this blowsy creature with drab hair. On the contrary, it distressed me greatly. I felt guilty and inadequate at what I took as a failure of my own perceptions, that I could not perceive a beauty which – it was plain from the others’ admiring homage – was there to be acknowledged by anyone else with eyes in his head. What was the matter with mine?

  Ellie admired herself in the mirror, turning her head on its short neck. She looked across at me with contempt, and demanded, ‘Can you sit on your hair?’

  Since my hair, cut short with a centre parting and fringe, barely covered my ears, it was not really a question calling for an answer. Nevertheless, I answered in a small voice, ‘No. I’m afraid I can’t.’

  ‘I thought not,’ remarked Ellie, sitting back, well satisfied.

  Tom, on the other hand, the elder of Maud’s two brothers, was beautiful; or would have been, if something – as a child I had no idea what it might be – had not happened to him.

  That night, on our way home on the bus, nestled blissfully between Maud’s left arm and her bony hip, I asked sleepily, ‘Why is Tom like that?’

  Maud drew away, making me sit up, pouting.

  ‘Like what?’

  Me, faltering as I perceived that once again, all unmeaning, I had put my foot in it: ‘Like the way he is.’

  Maud repeated fiercely, ‘What you mean, the way he is? He’s the way he is like everyone’s the way they are. Why are you the way you are, little Miss Swankpot, I’d like to know?’

  Tears of disappointment welled up in my eyes. Up to that moment it had been such a lovely day.

  ‘I didn’t mean anything –’

  ‘It’s that nose of yours!’ Maud looked sideways at the offending organ as if she couldn’t stand the sight of it. ‘It’s turning up again, I can see it.’