Tales from a Master's Notebook

by Various

  She passed from telling me about the stew to telling me about her husband in the Irish Guards, ‘for the reason,’ she said, ‘that he never was a proper husband, because he had a wife already in England. Would you believe that?’

  ‘I’d believe anything,’ I said.

  ‘So he left me in due time and came back here to his wife. And I was stuck in Ireland, alone with my Mam, eating stew and workin’ in a factory that made loft insulation out of sheep’s wool. But you know how yer heart cramps up for a departed lover? I just couldn’t stand those cramps any more, so I left my job and took the boat and came to England. I wanted my man back. I knew his regiment was stationed somewhere here in Norfolk, so I looked about for a cheap place to live, and I rented this place from an old beet farmer named Ernie-something. He had hands that shook and he was dumber than any of my neighbours in County Cork, but he was kind.

  ‘Your side of the cottage was empty and had been empty since before the war. There wasn’t a stick of anything in it, except a bed, in this room we’re in: your room. It reminded me of those places in Ireland which people had abandoned in the Famine, and they just fell to pieces as the years passed and looters took everything out of them, but no one ever came back to live there.’

  ‘And,’ I said, ‘what about your man? Did you find him?’

  Nell hit the un-wounded side of her temple with the flat of her hand. ‘Men!’ she said. ‘I found him all right, but it never worked out. So I didn’t bother again, after that. After he was gone for good, I never took up with another man. For what do they do except break you down, bit by bit, until you feel you’re no one at all?’

  After a few days Nell suggested that she should go back to her side of the cottage and not trouble me any more, but she was still weak and giddy from her head wound, and anyway, the truth was I didn’t want her to go back. I liked caring for her. It gave purpose to my life, beyond the flowers and the chickens.

  I didn’t mind her having stolen my bed. I made up the narrow cot in the room next door and slept there.

  She hardly moved from my room, except to go to the lavatory, or to take a bath. She asked me to wash her hair one day and so I removed her bandage and took great care with the shampooing, drying her brittle hair and setting it into soft pin curls. When these came out of their pins and were brushed through, Nell smiled like a girl at this new reflection of herself. And then she said, ‘I just realised a wonderful thing, Mrs. Since I came into your house, that infernal knocking has gone quiet. But I don’t know why. What d’you make of that now?’

  ‘I don’t know, Nell,’ I said. ‘Was it all in your mind, d’you think?’

  ‘But you heard the knocking on my door, that day I fell.’

  ‘I did. But perhaps it was those lads from the bungalow down Hare Lane, rapping on your door and then running and hiding?’

  ‘Could’ve been. Might’ve been, I suppose. So that bit was real and the knocking on the wall was in my mind?’

  ‘I’m not saying it was, but all I know is, you thought it was me knocking on the wall, but it wasn’t.’

  ‘Unless you did it in your sleep.’

  ‘Yes. But then I would have woken myself up, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Well now, you can’t be certain of that. Not at all. For haven’t you heard of people getting out of their beds, still in the Land of Nod, and walking to the window and throwing themselves out and never waking until they were dead?’

  Most days, she reminded me that there was something she was searching for. She dreamed about her search, she said, and in the dream she heard herself refer to this unfound thing as The Sorrow. ‘But what in the world is it?’ she said. ‘Why do I call it that? And will I ever find it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Nell. I wonder if it was companionship you were searching for and now you have found it: you’ve found me.’

  She went silent and looked at me, critically, as though I had suddenly become a stranger to her again. Then, she said: ‘I’ve always call you “Mrs”, haven’t I? For years I’ve called you that. Is it that you don’t have a name?’

  ‘I have a name,’ I said, ‘but you may not want to bother remembering it.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘I might not. Or worse, I might keep getting it wrong. And then we’d be in a terrible muddle.’

  A few nights after this conversation, she called for me at one in the morning and I went into her room and saw her kneeling up in my bed and stroking the wall and laying her face against it. The wall was covered with a girlish paper, depicting meadow flowers in tiny garlands.

  ‘It was here,’ she said. ‘I remembered it! When I saw the moonlight glancing on these weeds, it came tumbling back to me.’

  ‘The Sorrow?’

  ‘Yes. All of it. Because this is where she was. Right here.’

  I sat down on the end of the bed. It was cold in the room.

  ‘Who was right here?’ I said.

  ‘Katie,’ she said. ‘Later, they said that was never her name, but that’s what I called her and that’s what she answered to. She was always “Katie” to me. And this was how she found me – by knocking on this wall.’

  I left her as she was, unmoving, with her cheek and her hands pressed to the wall and went and tugged on my dressing gown. I told her I would be back with a hot drink and I went down and boiled milk for chocolate.

  I set the warm drinks down on her bedside table and put on the bedside light, with its dim little parchment shade. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘tell me about Katie.’

  It was difficult for her to begin. She said she thought she had to start at the end, where The Sorrow resided.

  ‘I was in prison,’ she said. ‘No idea how long for. Months or years. The charge was kidnap. And there is no silence in prison, did you know that? There is literally none. Even in the night, there are people screaming.’

  ‘Do you want to have a sip of the hot chocolate, Nell?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I’ll take a sip when I’m over this bit, the prison bit. When I’m back again in my cottage. On second thoughts, I’ll go there right away. For I can’t talk about prison. I never could.

  ‘But I remember walking back into my house and everything was filthy, for no one had been near the poor place. Filthy! And I was, too. I stank of the jail. I lit the Baxi, to get some hot water, and when it came hot I soaked myself for hours on end in the tub, to get that stench away. And what did I hold in my hands all that time but a little yellow plastic duck I found on the rim of the tub, and which had belonged to Katie. The eejit thing could never could stay upright in the water and we used to laugh, so we did, every time it fell over – laugh and laugh. And that sound of Katie’s sweet laughter, I thought that would stay with me, in my mind and never go away, but it did, see? It did. It all went away and left me searching.’

  ‘Now,’ I said. ‘Take a little gulp of the chocolate.’

  She did this. She said sweet things had always tortured her with desire, she’d had so few of them as a child in Ireland. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘once in a hundred blue moons, my Mam would buy me an ice cream and I used to see how long I could make it last. Then I’d wait too long and what I got was the dribble of the cream running all down my arms, and my Mam would say, “See, you didn’t really want it, did you? So now you’ve mucked your pullover and wasted sixpence”.’

  ‘What about Katie?’ I said after a little while. ‘Did she like ice cream?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Nell. ‘She’d never tasted it in the Children’s House – that place she’d been sent when she was five. Nor had they fed her right at all. She was so thin. I called her my Thistledown Girl. She was eight when she came to me, but she looked younger, she was so small. From the day I took her in, I did my best to get good food for her. Potatoes and pies. Ham. Baked beans. Fresh milk. Crab paste. Chocolate flakes. And sometimes, we’d have a picnic lunch in the long grass out there: hard boiled eggs and ham sandwiches. Triangles of cheese in silver wrappers. Cider in an old brown jar. And didn’t she just lo
ve that! She’d say “Nanny Nell” – that’s what she called me, Nanny Nell – “I think I’m in heaven now”.’

  ‘So Katie was an orphan, was she?’

  ‘No. She wasn’t. That was the foolish pity of it all. She was one of those children who get put into care because the Mam is crazy and on the cider and can’t look after them. But it was bad in that place, the place they called the Children’s House. Out beyond Dereham. You might have heard of it? They starved the kids to save money and the children were locked in their rooms for half the time, never breathing the fresh air, nor the scent of horses in a field, nor hear the robin singing …

  ‘Katie was there three years. They never taught her reading or writing, or anything at all in the way of learning. Then she crept away one night, with just a scarlet coat on her back. Imagine that? Little Katie walking through the dark ten miles in her red coat. Walking and walking and then getting so tired and cold she had to lay herself down. And so she went into your cottage – this cottage, which was all derelict, with its door swinging off – and climbed the stairs and lay on this bed. And then, near to morning, when I could just see light at the window, she knocked on my wall.’

  Nell warmed her hands on her mug of chocolate. She held herself very still, as though she needed to be motionless to remember the things she’d forgotten for so long. I stayed silent and waited for her to go on. Outside, I heard an owl calling.

  ‘I took her in. What would you have done, Mrs? I told her she was safe with me and need never go back to the Children’s House. I ran a bath for her, to warm her, and that’s when she showed me the little yellow duck she’d brought with her. She said it was the only toy that was hers and hers alone, that no one had stolen or confiscated. And we set the duck bobbing on the bathwater and watched it keep on falling over and that’s when I heard her laughter.

  ‘I had food in the house. I always kept hams hanging above the fireplace, liked we’d hung them in Ireland, so the smoke would preserve them. I think I probably kept them there, in truth, in case my man came back. There’s a woman’s folly, if ever there is one! Thinking all the while about what a man would like to eat and trying to lure him back with that! A man who’s gone back to a wife he never really left. And I’m buying and smoking hams for months on end. What kind of eejit does a thing like that?’

  ‘A smoked ham is a lovely piece of food.’

  ‘You’re right, Mrs. It is. And now it was there to give to Katie. She sat in my kitchen, drinking milk and eating the good ham with bread and butter and I said to her, “Is there anybody I should contact for you, or would you like to stay with me for a while?” She didn’t say anything at first, but when she’d eaten her ham she said she’d like to sleep. So I took her upstairs and put her in my bed and she held the little yellow duck to her face and slept, and when the morning came she said she wanted to stay with me and never go back into the world, for there was no one there who wanted her.’

  Nell put down her empty mug. She lay back on the pillow and said she had to sleep now. She told me her brain was brimming with remembered things and remembered things could explode in your skull like brimstone, so strong and insistent you half imagined lava seeping out of your eyes.

  She wasn’t able to tell me how long Katie had stayed with her. She said she thought it was more than a year, because Katie played on the swing all summer long and then the late summer came and the oaks along our road began dropping acorns, which the little girl liked to collect and polish with shoeshine and line up on her windowsill. And then the winter arrived once more, but Nell banked up the fire in the cottage parlour and bought books and pens, to teach Katie how to read and write. ‘She found this hard,’ said Nell, ‘because they’d never taught her the rudiments. But she was terrible good at pictures! She was a real little artist. She could make a colouring of an acorn look true to itself and a three-masted ship float on a turquoise ocean. And she made a drawing of me, once. She put a golden halo round my head and wings on my shoulders.’

  I had to ask whether anybody had come looking for Katie. I saw her go pale when I said this. ‘They did,’ she said. ‘And it was all in the papers, how a girl from the Children’s House had gone missing. But you see, Mrs, they were looking for the wrong thing: they were looking for a corpse. They thought Katie had been abducted and murdered. I wanted to say to them, “Don’t be behaving like you were in some stupid police soap on the TV. Nobody’s dead. Katie was searching for someone to care for her, that’s all, and she found her Nanny-Nell.”

  ‘But of course I said none of this. They sent a young policewoman, who looked like a schoolgirl herself. I wouldn’t let her in. I told her to run along and not keep bothering strangers with her nonsense and I saw her colour up in shame. I knew Katie was safely out of sight, playing on the swing. I informed the police girl I’d lived alone for years and years and had never been a mother, and how in the world did she think I could abide to have a child messing up my parlour? I asked her if she wanted a good recipe for Irish stew, and she went away. She no doubt thought that somebody who could break off from a murder investigation to discuss cookery was a waste of her time. If she’d come round the back of my house, she’d have seen the swing, and Katie on it, but she never bothered looking there. I don’t think she knew one lick of police procedure.’

  Nell told me she had never had any money, bar a few state benefits, but she bought clothes for Katie from a charity shop in East Dereham. The two of them went for walks at dusk and heard pheasants squawking in the fields. She said everything was all right, everything was as happy as could be, until one day, Aunt Babbage turned up, unannounced.

  ‘Who’s Aunt Babbage?’ I asked.

  ‘Aunt Babbage,’ she said, ‘was my Mam’s younger sister, Barbara. We always called her “Babbage” – I can’t recall why. I guess we started out calling her “Babs” and then it got added to. Sometimes you take away from a name and sometimes you add to it, and who knows the meaning of this little human game?

  ‘Babbage had looked out for me when I was a girl and sometimes bought me a stick of rock from the kiosk on the sea strand. But she’d stayed in Ireland when I went away. I thought I might never see her again. But she was a woman who loved surprises and her face, when she stood on my doorstep, had sheer joy all seepin’ out of it.

  ‘It was the middle of a winter afternoon and Katie and I had been by the fire, drawing pictures, so didn’t my precious girl come running, to see who this was at my door and Aunt Babbage said, “Who in the world is this child, Nellie?”

  ‘I was stuck for words. I loved Aunt Babbage. I wanted to tell her everything that had happened, but I knew I couldn’t. I told her Katie belonged to a sick mother (which of course had been true, long ago) and that I was caring for her while the woman mended herself.

  ‘Aunt Babbage came in. She had a suitcase with her, one of those old things made of card, but with proper locks on them that pop up like a jack-in-the-box when you slide a little bolt. She asked me if I’d got her letter and I said “There was no letter, Babs, perhaps because we have a new postman, name of Reg, who doesn’t know his round yet.” She said, “Well too bad, Nellie, but I’m staying two weeks here, if that’s all right with you. England is a foreign place to me, so you’d better take care of your Aunty and explain the behaviour of the natives to me, or I might get lost in a British fog!” She was a one for jokes. Katie took to her right away and began showing her drawings of pirates and frogs and fishing boats and me with my halo, and the two of them were friends in no time.

  ‘All that night, I stayed awake, wondering if I should confide in Aunt Babbage. The thing was, Mrs, what I’d done seemed right and normal to me, but I knew how anyone from the outside world would see it: they’d think I’d kidnapped Katie, stolen her away from her life. Yet the opposite was true. She’d had no “life” at the Children’s House, just neglect and sadness. She’d arrived in my life, like a soft breeze arrives unannounced in summer, but nobody could be expected to understand that, could the
y now?’

  Once Nell had begun on her memories of Katie, she wanted to keep on and on telling them to me. She said she had a film (she pronounced it ‘fillem’) spooling round inside her and she had to keep talking until the movie got to its end. But I could see that the talking tired her. Her appetite seemed to fail and she slept a deep sleep for long periods of the day. I asked her if she’d like to leave her story here, with Aunt Babbage’s visit, but she said no, she had to come back to the next bit, when The Sorrow began.

  She said: ‘Aunt Babbage was smart, you see, Mrs? She knew that Katie had been living with me for a good while, and one night, when Babs and I had been drinking brandy and ginger wine, she persuaded me to tell her how it had all come about. And afterwards, Babbage, she says to me “There’s criminality in our family, Nell, true Irish wickedness, and this is what you’ll be accused of if you don’t go to the Social Services and tell them everything. Because sooner or later, the police are going to track Katie down.”

  ‘I refused to do it, point blank. I said Katie was happy now. She had a swing and a garden of wild flowers. Why give her back her old unhappiness and blight her future? But Aunt Babbage said, “There is no future for the two of you and you know it, Nell Greenwood. That child should be properly educated and leading a normal life, so you go along tomorrow and confess everything, or I’ll have to do it for you.”

  ‘She understood how sorrowful I was at the thought of losing Katie. She suggested that when the Social people heard my story, when they understood that Katie was happy with me and that I cared for her, they might let her stay on, provided I put her into school.

  ‘But she only said that to tempt me to go and come clean about what I’d done. Aunt Babbage knew that Katie would be taken away and of course she was. She wasn’t wearing that little red coat she’d had. She’d long grown out of that. But that’s how my mind thinks of her leaving: going away into the police car, in her red coat and turning and waving to me and her little face all blotchy with crying.