by Nina Bawden
Towards morning, it grew perceptibly colder. He woke in his stinking bunk and said, “Chip-chop-change, weather gone, weather gone, chip-chop-change.” At first he thought it was his mother speaking and then he knew it was not. She was dead and gone, dead and shut in a box. They had taken her away down the narrow stairs; the coffin had jammed in the turning and they had sweated in their black coats until, in the end, they had sawn away part of the banister rail. Four black horses with polished shoes and feathery plumes had drawn her carriage to the cemetery. All that she owned had been sold to pay for the funeral. When she was buried, his aunt had sat on the shiny, leather couch in the parlour and mourned: what shall we do now, what shall we do with the boy?
Grumbling and shivering, he sat on the edge of the bunk and felt beneath it for his surgical boot. When he found it, he dangled it limply between his knees and stared vacantly across the narrow limits of the caravan to the naked, grease-smeared wall. A low table, covered with cracked linoleum, stood between the bunk and the wall: on it lay a bar of Nut Crunch and a blue saucer full of bird seed. In one corner of the caravan there was a Primus stove and a kettle, in another, a pile of empty bean-tins, old seed-cartons and mouldy hunks of bread. His housekeeping was methodical and simple. Every day he wiped the table with a wet cloth and swept the floor. Once a week, he shovelled the pile of rubbish into a sack and threw it into the sea at high tide. He never changed his clothes.
It came to him, dimly, that it was time for him to go, but he did not stir. Pearly-grey light came through a small window cut in the door. Hanging in front of it, was a bird cage covered with a torn piece of rag and now, as the man sat on the bunk, the canary began to twitter sleepily. With a grunt, the man heaved himself upright and fastened the boot on to his dreadful foot. Limping across the caravan, he removed the covering from the cage and said tenderly, “Woke up, have you, Johnny?” The bird ruffled its feathers and regarded him with eyes that were like small chips of black boot polish. It made no sound.
Chirruping gently, he filled his palm with seed and opened the cage door. The bird fluttered out, landed on his middle finger and began to peck at the seed. When it had finished, the man laughed and tossed the bird into the air. It flew round the caravan and settled on a ledge above the bunk, watching him while he lit the stove and put the kettle on. He made strong tea in a brown-ringed mug and drank it slowly; between sips, he chewed on a piece of bread that he had taken out of his pocket. Then he called the canary and it came to him. He held it in his hand, caressing its feathers and murmuring love words before he put it back in the cage.
He picked up the bar of Nut Crunch and stepped out into the cold air. The sun was just coming up. He went quickly across the field, between the sleeping caravans, until he reached a blue and white painted one that stood by the gate, its long shafts resting on the ground. A small tent was erected on its lee side, the thin canvas sides bulged with movement.
The man stopped and sucking his lower lip, whistled softly. The flap opened and a small, dark head appeared.
“It’s all right, girlie,” he said softly. “It’s only Uncle. What do you think I’ve got for you?”
The gipsy eyes sparkled. “Lolly?”
“Something nicer than that. Will you give Uncle a kiss for it?”
The child pouted. “Dunno. What for, anyway?”
“Crunchie Bar,” he said and held it up in front of her. Her face became pinched with greed, her tongue crept out between her kitten’s teeth.
She taunted him. “My Dad says I’m not to speak to you. You’re a loony. That’s what my Dad says. All them that sweeps the roads, they’re all loonies.”
He crouched on his haunches and threw the Crunchie Bar on the ground between them. She stared at him suspiciously. Then she wriggled out of the tent on hands and knees. She wore a cotton vest and navy knickers, round her small neck hung a thin, gold chain with a dependent cross. The man had found it in the gutter a few days before and given it to her.
She made a sudden dive and kissed him damply and swiftly, her coarse, curly hair tickling his cheek. He tried to take her in his arms but she evaded him and fled back to the tent. He followed her. Lifting the flap, he peered inside. She was crouching at the far end on a safari bed.
“You forgot your Crunchie Bar,” he said.
She shook her head. “Go away. Don’t want your mouldy old Crunch Bar.”
A dog barked in the field and he glanced swiftly over his shoulder. A boy was standing by the steps of a caravan about thirty yards away and watching him.
The man dropped the flap of the tent and began to limp away towards the gate. The boy bent with a quick gesture and jerked his arm forward as if he were throwing a stone. The man ducked instinctively and quickened his pace. The boy laughed loudly and put his thumb to his nose.
Above, in the cold sky, there was a pale ring round the sun.
Hilary had been awake since six o’clock. Wearing her Dayella nightgown, frilled at the neck and wrists and covered with pink rosebuds, she stood on a cane-bottomed nursery chair, her nose pressed against the cold glass of a small aquarium. The water was the colour of weak tea, faintly cloudy as if a dash of milk had been added to it. Dark shapes moved mysteriously over the glass sides and clustered on a smooth, spotted stone.
There were no fish in the aquarium. Once, long ago, there had been two mountain minnows: they had died within a day of each other. Hilary had not mourned their death for they had been dull and disappointing fish, quite unlike the glorious, flashing creatures she had hoped for. The tank had been a birthday present and one that she had chosen; she had imagined a glittering, alien world like the tanks in the pet shop, with bright, fantastic shapes gliding between waving water-weed. When she saw the small tank and the drab minnows, she had wept. Alice had been understanding and reasonable. She said she understood Hilary’s disappointment but she had expected too much. Tropical fish could only live in heated water and such a tank would have been too expensive a present, wouldn’t it, for such a little girl?
Once the minnows were dead, however, Hilary had lost her desire for fish. There were snails in the tank and she loved them dearly, feeding them, when she remembered, with dandelion leaves gathered from the garden. In the beginning, there had been only two snails but they had multiplied rapidly and incestuously: now there were so many that it was impossible to count them. The biggest were the size of heir thumb nail and the smallest barely visible: minute dots crowding on the green stalk of the one, fragile weed.
Hilary talked to them in a maternal voice, calling them by name in the manner of Miss Spiegler checking the roll call at school. “Bernice, Chloe, Ariadne….” Her lips moved against the glass, making a damp, cloudy pattern. To spite Peregrine, she had insisted that there were no boy snails in the aquarium.
When she heard the dust-cart, she jumped off the chair and went to the window. Lately, she had not bothered to look out at the sweeper in the mornings but to-day she was bored. Peregrine, who usually woke before she did, was still sleeping soundly, breathing heavily through his open mouth.
The nursery looked out over the road and the high window was barred with vertical, iron rods. Holding on to the bars, she climbed on to the sill and peered through them.
The man was two or three houses away, sweeping the gutter with a long, smooth movement and picking up the dirt with his spade. She could see the top of his head, covered with a tweed cap. As he came nearer, almost opposite the front gate of Peebles, she began to tap with her fingers on the window pane. This was a game the children had played the summer before: Hilary had forgotten it until this moment. You tapped on the window until the dustman or the postman looked up and then you hid behind the nursery curtains. If you attracted their attention without being seen, you won a point. If you were spotted, you lost two.
The man glanced up briefly and went back to his sweeping. He was a different man from the one she remembered from last summer’s game and yet there was something familiar about him. Suddenly, for n
o reason at all, she was afraid. Fear twisted deliciously in her stomach. She dreaded the moment when he would look up again and yet she longed for him to see her. She banged her knuckles loudly on the window pane.
This time, he looked up at once. Leaning on his long broom, he scanned the windows of Peebles with flat, incurious eyes. His gaze was long and leisurely and rested, finally, on the nursery window. There was no perceptible change in his manner, no suggestion in the white, uplifted face that he saw anything unexpected or out of the ordinary but he remained, for an endless stretch of empty time, quite immobile and staring at the window.
She knew him now, for certain, and the knowledge was terrible. She pressed herself against the cold bars, hoping that stillness might save her. What she could not see from the window, her memory supplied: the wide, black coat sweeping low over the twisted foot. Feeling his eyes burn into her, she gave a low cry and closed her own. Holding herself rigid, she thought: he won’t recognise me, not in my nightgown. And then she knew, with awful certainty, that God had marked her for just this occasion. For what other reason, when she had been born so plain, had she been given her one beauty, her bright, unmistakeable, red hair?
She did not see him go. When she opened her eyes, he was walking away, pushing his green cart. Her fingers hurt: she loosened them slowly from the bars and saw that they were covered with dark grains of rust. Peregrine was awake, he was watching her sleepily from the bed.
“It was Him,” she said, jumping down from the sill and running to him for comfort. She crouched, shivering, on his bed.
“Who?” he asked, yawning and stretching his legs beneath the bedclothes.
She remembered his recent betrayal of her and stiffened.
“I shan’t tell you,” she said heavily, getting off the bed and hauling her nightgown over her head. She stood naked, a paunchy child with a tendency to bandy legs and scratched her buttocks. She knew that in punishing him she was depriving herself of a certain comforter but she did not shrink from her decision.
“You’re a traitor,” she said. “In the Middle Ages, they used to burn traitors at the stake. You’re bound,” she ended with relish, “to come to a bad end.”
The pallor of his cheeks, the mournful gaze of his dark eyes, produced a mounting excitement in her. She had an easily diverted temperament.
“It would be dreadful to burn,” she went on. “Think how it hurts if you scald your finger under the hot tap. It would be a thousand, thousand times worse than that.”
Meekly, he bowed his head in the face of her just anger.
“I didn’t mean to,” he protested in a weak and injured tone. He blinked rapidly at her and promised, “You can borrow my pen if you like.”
She hesitated before this attractive offer. Then she said, “Don’t want your beastly old pen. It writes like a spider walking.” She hitched up her knickers and pulled on her gingham dress.
He looked at her plaintively. “I don’t feel well,” he prevaricated. “You’d be sorry if I died.”
His lack of fight drove her to worse excesses. “I wouldn’t be sorry. I’d dance and laugh. If you were burned, you’d smell like roasting meat.” She rolled her eyes and smacked her lips appreciatively.
He snivelled sadly into the sleeve of his pyjamas and she regarded him contemptuously. “Cowardy custard,” she said. She left the nursery and closed the door.
The landing glowed with a weird, green light. At Peebles, the windows on the staircase, in the lavatory and at the sides of the front door, were of stained glass. Alice, when she had re-decorated the house and hung prints from Picasso’s blue period on the walls, had wanted to remove the coloured glass but on this point, Charles had made one of his rare, determined stands. As a child, he had thought the colours rather jolly and he was sentimental about his childhood. He knew the stained glass was old-fashioned but it still seemed to him a fairly pleasing folly and he could not understand why it should offend his wife. When friends came to the house Alice pretended that she thought the glass amusing.
Hilary looked at her pale green hands and felt like a rare, strange creature in the depths of the sea. As she went down the stairs, she saw the morning newspaper and the letters lying on the mat before the hall door, bathed in a soft, religious light. The segments of glass in the narrow window by the door were blue and yellow and rosy red.
She picked up the letters and examined them carefully. There were two for her father and several for Alice. These she dismissed: her parents’ letters were seldom interesting. The remaining letter was for Janet and this she examined with care. The bulky envelope had been posted locally and the address was written in a fine, flowing hand.
“Prying little pig,” said Janet, suddenly appearing behind her. She was dressed in dark-blue linen and the skin of her face was pale and slippery as if she had been crying.
Hilary was shocked by her sudden, stealthy appearance. Concealing Janet’s letter in the pocket of her dress, she said accusingly, “I didn’t hear you come down.”
“I daresay you didn’t. I was in the kitchen. I’ve been up for hours. Were you going to open the letters?”
Hilary answered truthfully, “I don’t know.” Janet picked up the letters and looked through them. The envelope was burning a hole in Hilary’s pocket. She said rudely, making matters worse, “There wasn’t one for you, anyway.”
“I can see that.” Janet laughed nervously and touched the white bow at her throat.
“I don’t suppose Uncle Aubrey can be bothered to write to you every day,” said Hilary outrageously. “I expect he thinks you’re silly, really.” She looked uncertainly at her half sister. “Soppy Janet,” she said.
Janet did not answer. She did not even look angry. The expression of her eyes was sad and sorrowful; her dejected appearance depressed Hilary. Sighing gently, she stood on one leg and scratched the back of her knee with the toe of her sandal. She had not intended to steal the letter but she could not possibly replace it now without Janet noticing. The corners of her mouth turned downwards, she sighed again.
Janet was relieved, rather than upset, because the letter she expected had not come. Lately, Aubrey’s long, poetic letters had begun to bore her. She was no longer impressed by his poetry—most of it, she considered, was too bad to be flattering to her and the good bits had a familiar ring. Her critical attitude distressed her although she was sure that her feelings for Aubrey were unchanged. She did not love him less because she could not bear to. It was so much more important to love than to be loved: if she should cease to love Aubrey, what would happen to her? Her heart would be empty, her life a desert. She had been thinking a good deal about the death of love in the past few weeks and had often wept in private.
She heard Hilary sigh and looked down on her with lofty pity. “Other people’s letters are much duller than you think they’re going to be,” she said kindly. “Isn’t it your turn to lay breakfast?”
“I suppose so,” Hilary agreed, and went with leaden feet into the dining-room.
Scowling at the sunlight that lay in dusty shafts across the table, she slapped the place mats down on the dark, polished wood and set out the cutlery. She took the pepper and salt from the sideboard, the coloured tile for the coffee pot and the bottle of Worcester sauce for Auntie. The napkins, rolled in their rings of Italian straw, were jumbled among the knives and forks. Glancing over her shoulder, she took the letter out of her pocket, opened it, screwed up the pages to make it look like an old letter, and stuffed it at the back of the linen drawer. This action made her feel worse, not better. She frowned at her reflection in the silver sugar-basin. The curved sides widened her face into a fat, pale slab in which wicked, piggy eyes glinted angrily. She thought she had never seen anything so horrible, so empty of hope.
“Ugly beast,” she addressed the face. “Horrible Hilary. Everyone hates you.”
Depression dragged her down into the pit. She was unwanted, set apart from other people. She read letters that did not belong to her an
d, in her incurable greed, stole chocolate biscuits from the larder. She felt her badness grow inside her like a dark flower. She wanted to shout, to stamp her feet and cry. She heard her mother talking to Peregrine in a loving voice as she came down the stairs.
“Put on your blue jersey, darling, the weather’s changed. Hurry, or we’ll start breakfast without you.”
Hilary pushed her porridge round her plate. She made a contour map with islands of porridge and rivers of milk.
“Don’t mess your food about,” her mother said. “Look how nicely Peregrine behaves.”
Beside his sister, Peregrine ate daintily, his napkin tied round his neck. He hated to get his clothes dirty; if he were to drop porridge on his trousers they would have to be changed immediately. After his first, nervous glance at Hilary as he slid into his seat, he had been too embarrassed to look at her. He knew, though he had forgotten how or why, that he had let her down and the knowledge of his own inadequacy distressed him.
Opposite the children, Auntie mumbled at her food and read the New Statesman. Her mouth was pouchy and lined and soft, her whole face sagged in worn creases like an old leather handbag. White drifts of talcum powder lay on either side of her nose. She was grossly old: her eyebrows bristled like a man’s and the hair on her head was so sparse that areas of skin, pink and soft as a baby’s, showed through the thin, grey strands. She wore a shapeless dress of grey alpaca held at the waist by a linked, silver belt sent, long ago, from India by an elder, bachelor brother. A knitted cardigan of beige wool was fastened at her pulpy throat by a ruby and emerald brooch. Her chief and lasting impression was one of excellent quality as if she had been fashioned out of the best materials and built to last. In order to impress a world that no longer cared about her, she acted several, deliberate character parts. Sometimes she was the imperious, eccentric aristocrat, sometimes she infuriated Alice with a display of excessive humility. Beneath her various poses she concealed a shy defended heart. She loved Charles as tenderly as a very young girl: Alice, she thought, was nowhere good enough for him.
