by Eva Ibbotson
He was the headmaster – superb in horn-rims, with three unbelievably beautiful and entirely parallel lines across his forehead and the eyes of a bloodhound which has reached Enlightenment.
It was to Mr Hunter, naturally, that I took the problem of the baby Jesus.
I sought him out at break, in the beastly office which the Education Committee deemed good enough for him: processed-pea walls, a homicidal gas-fire, acres of asphalt framed in the window …
‘Mr Hunter,’ I said quickly, anxious not to waste his time. ‘Do you know how I could get hold of a baby?’
Mr. Hunter blinked behind his horn-rims and came back from a long, long way away. His face was unbearably sad and because I loved him I knew that he had been thinking about his sorrow, which is the same sorrow as besets so many head teachers in the poorer English primary schools, namely the lavatories which were too few, too far away, too old …
‘A baby, Miss Bennet?’
‘For the Nativity Play.’
‘Ah.’
Mr Hunter had been angelic about my Nativity Play – the more so because recently he had been away on a Drama Course. This course said that old-fashioned, rehearsed plays were right out for young children. Drama, said this course, had to ‘Come Spontaneously From Within’. Whereas my play was the old-fashioned kind with the Angel Gabriel in golden wings and Shepherds with tea-towels on their heads and the Virgin Mary (if only they cured her nits in time) singing ‘Little Jesus Sweetly Sleep’. And since I and my class had eaten, slept and dreamed the Nativity Play for the past fortnight and were covered in sticking plaster from fixing crowns and stars and golden trumpets, and had to wade knee-deep through bundles of straw every time we wanted to get to a cupboard, I doubted very much whether it could be classed even remotely as ‘Spontaneous Drama Coming From Within’.
‘There would be certain hazards with a real baby, don’t you think?’ suggested Mr Hunter now.
‘I know, but I don’t think it matters. I mean Jesus was real, wasn’t he, on earth – he did cry, he must have done. I don’t want it all prettied up. I want them to feel—’
But here I broke off because what I wanted my thirty-five awful children to feel about the birth of Christ was something I couldn’t put into words. So I looked at my reflection in Mr Hunter’s horn-rims and wondered whether if I hadn’t been wearing a badge which said ‘I am Superman’s friend’ and a chain of glass beads which Jimmy MacAlpine had almost certainly shop-lifted for me from Woolworths, not to mention a decayed chrysanthemum from Russell Taylor’s Dad’s allotment, I might have found favour in his eyes.
‘What about Mrs Burtt?’ asked Mr Hunter, rubbing his nose, a gesture he performed with unbelievable grace.
It was a good question. Mrs Burtt could generally be relied upon to do a baby every year – but of course this year some interfering person from the Family Planning had been at her.
‘Or Mrs Taylor?’
But as I explained to him, Mrs Taylor too had chosen this year of all years for her sabbatical.
In the end I had to tear myself away from Mr Hunter, the issue unresolved, and go to the staff-room where Miss Crisp, who taught the top class, was busy crunching up a custard cream between her even white teeth and despising me.
In the matter of the all-pervading love at Markham Street, Miss Crisp was quite definitely the exception that proves the rule. She was related to the Butterworths who owned the vast Chemical Works and therefore virtually the town – so that she ‘obliged’ rather than taught. She was neat and composed and never wore badges proclaiming that she was Superman’s Friend or belonged to the Lollipop League. Her class always seemed to be sitting in orderly rows looking at the blackboard and hamsters never got loose in her Wendy House because she didn’t keep any. What is more, on Friday her Register added up neatly in all directions and when Mr Hunter came to check it she would lean over him complacently, revealing acres of calm and creamy bust.
We worked hard on the Nativity Play all the next week. Lacking the real thing, we had cast the best doll we could find for the baby Jesus, but really it was no good pretending it was a success. There was a static, glassy quality about its pinkly shining face which was the absolute antithesis of the warm radiance the part required. And when Maggie Burtt, still sticky around the head but mercifully restored to me, leant over the manger and said ‘Shut yer bloomin’ mouth,’ instead of ‘Hush, my baby’ I found it hard to chide her as I should.
In the afternoon, walking home to my digs on the other side of the town, quietly saving Mr Hunter from fire or pestilence or flood, I would succumb to sudden and terrible lusts … These lusts were not what you think they were, though I had those too. They were lusts for Jonathan Tobias Butterworth.
Jonathan Butterworth was possibly the most beautiful thing in the whole town – always excepting the three marvellous parallel lines which swept across Mr Hunter’s forehead – and really he had reason to be. His father, after all, owned the Butterworth Works and was worth millions, and his mother – acquired by Mr Butterworth during a business trip to the States – had been a famous model.
He was a gorgeous baby, the kind you find on Renaissance ceilings: silky, dandelion-coloured curls; dimples; a sudden stomach-turning smile … A natural for a Nativity Play. Almost, one might say, heaven-sent.
The Butterworths, when not living it up in Menton or Acapulco, inhabited a great grey turreted and crenellated mansion separated from the busy road by a high beech hedge. I passed this house on the way to and from school and again at weekends when I went to visit Jimmy MacAlpine who was in a children’s home nearby. Now, with the beech leaves curled and withered, I caught agonising glimpses of this clean and reverent-looking baby lying in his high black pram. There were days when he was so close to the road that I could have put out a hand and grabbed him – and Tantalus had nothing on me then.
Once I suggested to Miss Crisp that in view of her relationship with the Butterworths she might like to borrow him for me. It was a joke, but not apparently a good one.
‘What, expose him to all the dirt and germs down here! You must be out of your mind!’ she said – and grabbed as usual the last of the custard creams.
By the end of the last full week of term I knew that the play was going to be a complete and utter flop. They just couldn’t seem to feel the awe, the reverence …
‘Fear not,’ Jimmy MacAlpine would yell lustily from his step-ladder at a Maggie Burtt about as fearful as a haggis.
’ ‘ Ere, ‘ave some gold,’ mumbled the Magi, thumping their offerings like sacks of coal across the baby’s chipped and china feet.
I must say Mr Hunter, whose cool, austere and Christian name was Charles, was marvellous. Never once did he say that he had told me so. Never once did he even hint that ‘Drama Should Come Spontaneously From Within’. And as he picked his way across my classroom that last Friday, dodging collapsible stable doors and avoiding deformed angelic harps, and took with gentle hands the maimed and bleeding thing that was my register, I thought that two hundred rose-pink, low-level toilets with onyx cisterns would not have been too good for him.
By the morning of the performance I had reached that bottomless pit of gloom and apprehension which is reserved for people who get mixed up in producing plays.
And then, just as I was tottering towards the staff-room for morning break, a small boy panted up to me and handed me a note. And when I had read it, hope – no longer a stranger – uncurled inside my sleeping breast. Not only hope, actually, but an idea – rather a good idea – though it involved certain risks. So busy was I working it out that I didn’t even hear the usually deafening sound of Miss Crisp crunching with white and even teeth, her custard cream.
Mr Hunter was letting us use the hall, at the end of which was a raised platform which made (though it was curtainless) a splendid stage.
By two-thirty the mothers were in their place, the other classes with their teachers had filed in behind them. I pinned on Maggie’s mantle for the third
time, muttered final instructions to Jimmy MacAlpine and went to the piano out in front. Mr Hunter nodded. I broke into ‘A Virgin Most Pure’.
And the play began …
I shall never forget it, never! I couldn’t see a lot from where I sat at the piano but I could hear and, by heaven, I could feel! And even before Jimmy, pale with excitement, had finished annunciating from his ladder, I knew it was going to be all right. Better than all right. A triumph!
All the awe, the wonder I had tried to get across and failed, were there right now. Joseph leading Mary into the stable with a sudden, startled look – a look of conspiracy – as though this birth was a marvellous secret they both shared. Maggie Burtt herself, crooning over the crib, half-dotty with tenderness. The shepherds pushing, jostling for a view of the manger … Long, long before the Magi rode in and laid their gifts with fearful tenderness beside the crib, there wasn’t a dry-eyed mother in the hall.
As a matter of fact, I was a trifle misted-up myself. Which is why, thumping out, ‘ Oh Come Let Us Adore Him’ for the final tableau, I did not at once take in the fact that two enormous blue policemen had entered the hall and were walking, grimly purposeful, to Mr Hunter’s side.
Almost immediately I began to feel sick. So it seems did Jimmy MacAlpine, for he broke from the tableau on the stage and dived for my skirt, wriggling off his wings as he came. His flight was the signal for the other children to jump off the platform too and seek the shelter of their Mums. One didn’t trifle with policemen at Markham Street.
From the empty stage, the forgotten manger, came a single sound: ‘Gaa!’ And then again, imperatively: ‘Gaa!’
I lifted my head. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
Mr Hunter leapt on to the platform and the two policemen followed. There was a moment’s frozen silence, then: ‘Will you come here, please, Miss Bennett?’ called Mr Hunter, and there was something in his voice that I had never heard before.
I dislodged Jimmy and climbed up. Then I stood looking down at the manger.
Something was wrong all right …
There he lay on a snow-white lace-edged cushion, his silky, dandelion curls adorably tumbled; his dark, measureless lashes framing the night-blue eyes … Lay there, smiling his celestial gummy smile, flexing his shell-pink toes and crowing in uncontainable ecstasy. No wonder the play had been a triumph!
‘It’s the Butterworth baby all right,’ said one of the policemen.
‘Did you know that this baby was stolen from its pram earlier today, Miss Bennett?’ said Mr Hunter, his voice as grey and relentless as winter rain.
‘Of course she knew it! She stole it herself! She as good as told me she was going to!’ Miss Crisp had broken from the audience and was pointing at me with a shaking finger.
‘I saw her myself,’ she continued to shriek. ‘I saw her at dinner-time sneaking in something wrapped in a shawl.’
The second policeman turned half apologetically to me. ‘Seems as someone did see you, Miss, coming down the hill…’
I looked over to where Jimmy MacAlpine, pale and shaking, was crouching by the piano. I didn’t understand anything, not anything at all.
No, that wasn’t altogether true. One thing I understood all right. The cold, hostile, accusing look on Mr Hunter’s half averted face.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. ‘I did it. I stole the baby from his pram.’
Later they made me go to the police station and asked me a lot of questions. Mr Butterworth was there, blue-jowled and ferocious and though no harm had befallen his baby, there was talk of prosecutions and summonses and a lot of other things I scarcely heard and didn’t try to understand.
I was frantic by the time I got back to school, but it was all right. Though the children had all gone, ‘Our Les’ was exactly where I had left him, tucked into his cardboard box in the corner of the Wendy House.
I pulled it out and looked at him.
All right, so he was no beauty. Was in fact the ugliest baby I had ever seen … He had scurf; he had spots and in the stumpy blob which passed for his nose, the mucus bubbled like soup.
Still, he was a baby, a real baby and when Mrs Burtt’s cousin’s sister-in-law had sent a message that morning to say I could have him for the play I’d been overjoyed. So had Jimmy, when I swore him to secrecy and showed him how to put the baby in the manger just before the play began. Jimmy adored secrets – he’d been enchanted at the idea of surprising the others, and where anything living was concerned I knew him to be one hundred per cent gentle and one hundred per cent safe. In the Children’s Home, it was Jimmy they put in charge of the younger ones.
So why, why? Why had he left ‘ Our Les’ to snore in the Wendy House and gone to such crazy and dangerous lengths to secure a substitute?
I fetched the thermos and the bottle ‘Our Les’s’ mother had given me and gave him a feed. Then I went for his dean nappy.
It wasn’t on the shelf where I had left it. Instead, a crumpled and soiled object lay rolled-up on the floor near by. Jimmy had changed him, then? Better make sure …
I undid the pins. And then, because I knew Jimmy like I knew Mr Hunter (and for the same reason) I understood everything. It was my fault, of course. Everything was my fault. I simply hadn’t checked the facts. I had made an assumption about ‘ Our Les’ and the assumption had been crashingly unjustified. And in stressing as I had done throughout the year the strength and vigour, above all the masculinity of Our Lord’s life on earth I had made sure of one thing. Never in a hundred years would Jimmy MacAlpine allow the part to be taken by a girl!
It was almost dark by the time I had taken the baby home and returned to school. Only in Mr Hunter’s office a light still burned.
It didn’t take me long to scribble my resignation and take it across to him.
‘This is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?’ I said, slamming the paper down on his desk.
Mr Hunter gazed at it through the horn-rims I would never see again.
‘I had hoped you would resign, certainly,’ he said. ‘The truth is—’
He was interrupted by the shrill, insistent ringing of the telephone. ‘Wait!’ he commanded and picked up the receiver. I watched his eyebrows shoot up as he listened, doing shatteringly beautiful things to the lines across his forehead which I had always loved so much.
‘Miss Bennett is with me now,’ he said presently. ‘Perhaps you would like to speak to her yourself?’ He put his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to me. ‘It’s Mr Butterworth. As far as I can gather, he wants to give you vast sums of money. Apparently when they got back with the baby they found there’d been an accident on the road outside their house. A lorry skidded on a patch of ice and slewed into their garden. If the baby had been in the pram, he would probably have been killed.’
Dazedly I took the receiver. Miracles make me nervous and this one was too close to the bone in every way. ‘Mr Butterworth? Miss Bennett speaking. Listen, Mr Butterworth, I don’t want anything for myself. No, really … But there is something that’s needed for the school. Badly needed.’
And very carefully, giving precise instructions – for I too had read the catalogues – I told him.
Then I put down the receiver.
‘Good-bye, Mr Hunter’ I said, stretching out my shaking hand. Mr Hunter ignored it; evidently my incredible nobility had completely stunned him and no wonder. How many men, after all, receive two dozen, low-level pedal-flush toilets at the hands of a girl they have wronged, humiliated and dismissed?
‘I was wondering,’ said Mr Hunter, still ignoring my outstretched hand, ‘how Jimmy MacAlpine got the baby into school?’
‘Russel Taylor’s brother’s box-cart,’ I said absently. I had found it abandoned in a corner of the yard. Then I stared at Mr Hunter.
‘You mean, you knew?’ I shrieked. ‘You knew all the time and yet you just stood there and let me resign?’
‘Caroline,’ said Mr Hunter – and my hitherto detested Christian name rang in m
y ears like a celestial glockenspiel. ‘ You have no idea what a strain it has been having you on my staff.’ He rose and took down his coat. ‘I’ll clear up the business, of course. I just didn’t want Jimmy to get pounced on before I’d had a word with the child care people.’
‘There were extenuating circumstances,’ I said – and explained about ‘Our Les’.
Mr Hunter smiled, then he put on his coat and steered me gently out of the door. Glorifying the huddled town, the shadowy chimneys, the Evening Star rose trembling in the Christmas sky.
‘I was wondering,’ said Mr Hunter, whose marvellous cool, austere and Christian name was Charles, ‘whether one might ultimately interest you in a more … orthodox way of getting hold of babies?’
I turned and looked at him. ‘ I am only interested,’ I said primly, ‘in one particular kind of baby. The kind with horn-rims and parallel lines across its forehead.’
Mr Hunter took my arm and drew it tenderly through his. ‘Curiously enough,’ he said, ‘that’s precisely the kind I had in mind.’
It was just eleven months later, at the beginning of November, that Alexander Dominic was bom. Though lacking at birth the spectacles I’d craved, he came, otherwise, up to my wildest dreams. But when I offered him, beaming with pride, to the girl who had taken over my class, she turned him down flat. She wasn’t doing a Nativity Play, she said. She had been on this course. ‘Drama’, she said, ‘Should Come Spontaneously From Within…’
THE LITTLE COUNTESS
IN THE early years of this century my grandmother (whose name was Laura Petch) became engaged to a Mr Alfred Fairburn. A month later she set off for Russia to be a governess.
‘Oh,’ I said, anguished, when first I heard the story, ‘wasn’t it awful for you both, being separated so soon afterwards?’
My grandmother, who was very old by then, gave me a look. ‘In those days, my dear,’ she said, ‘people knew how to wait.’ What with her brave sister Gwendolyn more or less permanently chained to the railings in Hyde Park because of women’s rights and her father a doctor in the London slums, my grandmother felt she wanted to achieve something before she settled down – and achieve something, in a sense, she did.
