by Gardam, Jane
‘How could they afford a school until he’s university age?’
‘There are scholarships. We each got one.’
‘We had better parents.’
‘I won’t have that,’ shouted Parable after him across the sand, ‘You have a boy yourself who’s clever. I bet he’ll be spared The Works.’
An hour later at the end of School Assembly and prayers Smith paused for a long minute before clanging the hand-bell that sent the rabble of Teesside to their class-rooms and announced that he wanted Terry Benson in his study.
‘Terry Njinsky? Venetski? Benson? A letter for you to take home.’
Terry, in some dream-scape, was kicked awake by his neighbours and looked about him. (‘What you done, Terry?’ ‘Only tried getting vodka for me Dad.’ ‘What—nickin’?’ ‘Nah—cash.’) A new respect for the already-respected Terry ran down the line.
Smith surveyed the crowd of spotty children, all thin. Grey faces. Poor. All underfed. Terry whatsname—Benson’s white-gold hair and healthy face shone amongst them (It’s said she gets them tripe). We’ll get that hair cut, Smith thought. Start at the top. I’ll write to the father.
‘Take a letter down now, Miss Thompson,’ he said back in his office.
‘I’m not sure Florrie Benson can read,’ said the secretary. ‘Me Mam said she was useless at school. And the father’s a cripple and only talks Russian. He’s a retired Russian spy.’
* * *
The letter was typed, nevertheless, that day and sat waiting for Terry to collect and take home. At the end of the afternoon the headmaster, Smith, came in and pointed at it and said, ‘Letter, Miss Thompson?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘He never came. I’ll tek it. I know where he lives, down Herringfleet. On my way home.’
‘No,’ said Smith, ‘I’ll drop it in. I can take the bike that way. Say nothing to the boy. He’s probably been trying all day to forget it. I’ll bike along the sand.’
‘You tired, Sir?’
‘Certainly not,’ he said, pulling on the ventilated mackintosh that made him paler still. ‘Certainly not! Box on.’
By tea-time, Florrie cooking brains and hearts on a skillet, the letter was lying across the room on the door-mat. The Odessan was having a better day and was in a chair. His back was to the door, but he sensed the letter. He said, ‘We have a letter. I heard a bicycle and a man cough. Pick it up, will you, Florrie?’
‘No,’ said Florrie adding dripping, peeling potatoes.
‘Then I’ll wait for Terry to do it. Where is he?’
‘It may not be for you,’ she said. ‘The last one was to me. And what came o’that?’
* * *
Years before there had come a letter on the mat that she remembered now like excrement brought in on a shoe. It was a letter in a thick cream envelope written in an operatic hand in purple ink.
In those days the situation at No. 9 Muriel Street was still an interesting mystery in Herringfleet. Most people kept themselves at a distance. People crammed together in mean streets are not always in and out of each other’s houses.
The letter had been sent without a stamp and delivered ‘By Hand’. It said so in the top, left-hand corner. The letter-paper inside was the colour of pale baked-custard and thick as cloth.
Dear Mrs. Vet(scrawl)y, it had said, ‘I would be so delighted if you would bring your little boy to a fireworks party—with supper, of course—on November 5th for Guy Fawkes’ Celebrations at The Towers. A number of local children will be coming and we hope to give them a lasting and happy experience. Five o’ Clock P.M. until 8 P.M. Warm coats and mittens. Sincerely yours. Veronica Fondle.’
‘She has asked me to a party,’ Florrie said. ‘Me and Terry.’ Anton watched her blush and smile and thought how young she was. How beautiful. ‘With Terence,’ she said. ‘Our Terence. For Guy Fawkes.’ She gazed at the letter. ‘It’s to be a supper—unless she means we take our supper?—and at night!’
‘What,’ he asked, ‘is Guy Forks?’
‘We burn a model of him every year. For hundreds of years. Because he once tried to burn down the Parliament in London.’
The Odessan considered this.
‘But we can’t go. I haven’t any clothes.’
He said, ‘It just says a warm coat and mittens. You have your better coat and we can get mittens.’
‘I think that means only the children. The mothers will be in furs.’
‘Here, in Herringfleet?’ said Anton and at once wrote the acceptance in fine copperplate on a card they found in an old prayer book. Nurse Watkins brought an envelope and took it round to the local private school, The Towers, where Veronica Fondle was the headmaster’s wife.
On the party day Terence, then not yet four, was scrubbed, polished and groomed but then became recalcitrant and unenthusiastic. He lay on his face on the floor and drummed his feet. When his mother walked in from the bath-house where she had been dressing, he roared and hid under his father’s bed, for this was a woman unknown. The lace on her hat (Nurse Watkins’ cousin’s) stood up around her head with black velvet ribbons enmeshed. Her cloth coat Nurse Watkins had enriched with a nest of red fox tail bundles round her throat. Beneath the chin, the vixen’s face clasped the tails in its yellow teeth. Poppies swayed about round the black straw hat brim. Her shoes were Nurse Watkins’ mother’s brogues worn on honeymoon in Whitby before the First World War, and real leather.
‘You’re meant to wear the veil tight against the face, like Greta Garbo, and tied round the back with the black ribbon, Florrie,’ said Nurse Watkins, shushing Terry on her knee.
‘I’ll never get it off.’
‘You’re not meant to get it off.’
‘Then how do I drink tea?’
Even Nurse Watkins didn’t know this.
The veil was left to float around the poppies. Anton said suddenly, ‘How beautiful you are,’ and Florrie disappeared out the back.
She came back saying that Nurse Watkins was to go instead of her and Terry kicked out at the table leg while Anton picked up the book on Kant he’d been reading which Florrie had ordered for him from the Public Library. All he said was, ‘Go!’
So outside over the railway bridge from Muriel Street the gas lights inside their glass lanterns were beginning to show blue as mother and son set off hand in hand.
There was no driveway up to The Towers just three wide, shallow steps, a big oak door with circles of wrought-iron leaves and a polished brass plate alongside saying The Towers, Headmaster, HAROLD FONDLE M.A. OXON. A chain hung down. Florrie picked up Terry and held him tight. Terry was in the full school uniform of Nurse Watkins’ nephew who went to a paying Kindergarten. He had had his first hair-cut. As Florrie stood miserably beside the chain the child shouted, ‘Me, me!’ and she let him drag it down. Far inside the house came a tinny clinking.
Florrie knew that something was now about to go wrong. Terry on her shoulder—rather heavy—seemed to be transfixed with terror by both the sound of the bell and the poppies in the hat. She set him down and clutched his hand. When the door opened she thought she might faint. The colours and heat within, the noise and laughter, the smell of rich food and spiced fruit and sweet drinks, the rasping whiff of gunpowder, the snap of crackers, the squealing of children running madly, waving sparkling, spitting lighted things into each other’s faces. The girls were all in heavy jerseys and gaiters with button boots, the boys in corduroy and mufflers. Several wore the tartan kilt. Across the entrance hall, propped against a carved fireplace, leaned a huge stuffed man with a grinning mask for a face and straw tufts coming out of his ears. He was waiting to be burned.
The maid who had answered the door however was only Bessy Bell, the Gypsy girl who’d known Florrie since school. ‘Eh, Florrie!’ she said. ‘’Ere. I’ll tek Terry in.’
‘I’ll tek ’im in meself, Bessie.’
‘No, it’s just to be ’im,’ said Bessie, ‘She said.’
‘Marvellous,’ cried a large woman, wearing a musquash coat, square shouldered, bearing down on them in the porch. ‘You found your way then Mrs. Van—Van Erskine? Splendid. We are short of boys.’
Behind the woman a door stood open upon a glittering dining room, a gleam of white cloth and shiny glasses. Silver cake-stands. Three-tiered, laden plates.
Then Florrie was out again on the steps alone.
* * *
She wondered if she was meant to sit there until it was eight o’ clock. Three hours. It was getting quite dark already. And cold.
She wasn’t going home, though. Oh, no! Nurse Watkins must never know. But there was nobody she knew round here to call in on. Especially dressed like this. There was the refreshment room over the station but the sandwiches were all curled up under glass and anyway she’d no money. And it might be closed. Father Griesepert? His church down by the beach would be locked up. It was a creepy place anyway. In the Presbytery he’d be drowsing now all by himself, alone with his whisky and his thoughts about purity. She’d never gone to him—nor he to her—even when her parents were dying.
The mist was thickening outside the ironwork porch of The Towers and she longed suddenly for her parents. Her father had once been a powerful, forceful, political man. Oh, she wanted a man. A man who stood straight and strong, who’d have brought the child here instead of her and looked round to see if the place was good enough. She folded herself down on the top step and began to disentangle the veil from the vixen’s teeth.
She wondered what Terry was doing.
If he needed the you-know-what, would he ask?
He still had to be helped with buttons. He’d not long finished with the chamber-pot. She often went with him down the privy in the yard especially in the dark. All those other children! Shouting and dancing about with the flaming wires. They were all so much older. Why ever had Terry been invited?
He wouldn’t be crying though. Terry never cried.
But, well, he might just be. He might be crying now. Would they notice him? Would they, any of them have the gump to think he might never before have been out in the dark? Would they look after him around the bonfire? Would he scream when he saw the man burning? Would they care?
That daft Bessie. No help there. Fourpence in the shilling. And she’d seen other people. All their proud horse-faced nannies in that hall. Eyebrows raised. She’d known Anton was wrong about the kids all being in uniform. Maybe in his country. Not here. Except if it was a sailor-suit and where would she get a sailor-suit? He’s not Princess Margaret Rose in London.
They might be being unkind and laughing at him. At this moment he might be screaming with fear. She’d seen his face as they grabbed him and carried him away. They all said he was advanced. Very, very, very clever—. But she’d seen his solemn face—.
He thinks I have left him and he won’t see me again. Fear blazed to inferno and she scrambled from the step through a laurel border and round to the back of the house to its rows of lighted windows and doors and the waiting bonfire. She stepped into a flower-bed and looked into a long room full of children sitting round a banquet.
It was a Christmas card of pink and gold and scattered with glitter. There were cart-wheels of cakes, pyramids of sweets and fruit. Nannies in dark blue dresses stood behind almost every child’s chair talking to each other out of the sides of their mouths but never taking their eyes off their charges. Iron-masters’ children. The other side of the tracks. She couldn’t see Terry.
One Nannie was pressing a rather torpid child into a high chair facing Florence. All the children were being firmly controlled. They’ll not forget the rules, these ones, she thought. There’ll be no fight left in them. She knew that this stuff wasn’t for Terry. Where was he?
She sensed an event. A few children were being restrained from banging spoons on the table-cloth and a tall iced cake was being carried in by a heavy smiling man who gripped a pipe between his teeth. Mr. HAROLD FONDLE, OXON! A maid came and began to cut the cake. Where, where was Terry?
Then she saw him. He was so close to her that she could have stretched to touch him but for the glass in the long window. He had his back to her. With his newly cut hair he looked like a tiny man. In both hands he held a glass of orange juice.
He was drinking from it. He was lifting it up in the air. He was bending backwards. Then he slid off his chair and turned towards the window and she stepped back. And, oh, he was beginning to cry!
And there was blood on his face and there was a jagged arc in the glass and on his hand and he was spitting out blood. He had swallowed glass!
She began to beat her fists against the window as first one person and then another noticed that there was a crisis. Shouting and consternation surged among the nannies. One gave Terry a savage shake and glass shot across the room. Terry stopped crying and grinned and Mrs. Veronica Fondle came swanning up like a barge at sunset.
Through the window Florrie heard her pea-hen cry that the child was probably only used to mugs, All well. All well.
But Florrie was by now at the front door again hanging on the bell chain, dragging it up and down and when Bessie answered she was across the hall and into the dining room to see Terry composedly eating porridge which some plumed assistant was spooning in to him. Mrs. Fondle in her furs stood nearby, en route to the garden where the bonfire was being lit. Smoke and one crackling flame. ‘Oh! Aha! Oh—Mrs. Verminsky!’ (She was laughing) ‘He took a bite from a glass! But please don’t worry. Nannie has counted all the bits and we have most of them. Boys tend to do this more than girls. We give them porridge just in case. Wonderful in the intestines—.’
Florrie seized the child in her arms as his mouth opened for more porridge. He looked at his mother and began to cry again.
‘There are worse things we have to face than glass.’ Mr. Harold Fondle strode by, his arms spiky with rockets, towards the bonfire.
‘Well, he’s coming home with me now,’ said Florrie. ‘I’ve had enough.’
* * *
‘But however did she know?’ Veronica Fondle called across to her husband that night in their avant-garde twin-bedded room. Outside, the bonfire was dowsed and ashy, the straw man a few fragments of rags and dust. ‘She must have been watching through the window. Crept into the garden. Peeping in at us!’
‘Perhaps we should have invited her in to the party,’ said Fondle. ‘He’s very young.’
‘Oh, I think not. There are limits.’
‘I have my reasons you know for keeping an eye on that boy. He could become one of my stars.’
‘So you say. Look, he’s perfectly all right. He’d eaten an enormous tea before that orange juice. He wasn’t worried when his mother came barging in.’
‘Well, his mother was. Very worried.’
They laughed as they turned off their individual bedside lights, like people in a dance routine. Click, then click.
‘Oh, and darling,’ she said in the dark. ‘The hat!’
‘Do you know,’ he said from the other bed, ‘I thought the hat was rather fine.’
PART THREE
Last Friends
CHAPTER 10
When Fiscal-Smith’s train reached Waterloo after the dreadful morning in Dorset he found himself reluctant for some reason to continue his journey to King’s Cross and then on to the North.
He was, for one thing, not exactly expected at home. He had intimated that he had been invited to stay for some time with old friends. And, also, he was now feeling distinctly unwell.
Already it had been a long morning for a man of his advanced years: up at 5 A.M. in the Dorset rain to examine a building half a mile away, said to be burnt out and which had turned out to be in perfect condition. Then that idiocy with Dulcie, locked alone with her inside the parish church and having to ring t
he bells for rescue. And so on.
And then Dulcie herself. Distinctly unwelcoming. And the awful daughter. And the glaring grandson. Sometimes, he thought, one should take a long, hard look at old friends. Like old clothes in a cupboard, there comes the moment to examine for moth. Perhaps throw them out and forget them. Yes.
But he had been able to make his mark with the delightful, new village family who had bought Veneering’s pile, his frightful Gormenghast on the hill. Fiscal-Smith would rather like to keep his oar in there. He would be pleased to have an open invitation to sleep in Veneering’s old house, tell these new people about their predecessor. Though maybe not everything about him.
Not that Veneering himself had ever once invited him there. Not even after that ridiculous lunch of Dulcie’s years ago, where all the guests were senile except himself and that boy and that desolate Carer. Like lunch in a care-home. Turned out in the rain. Had had to walk to the station on that occasion. Walk! Couldn’t do it now. Taxi would have cost three pounds even then. God knows how much now.
But there wouldn’t be much chance of making his mark with the new people either. Very casual manners these days. And Dulcie had taken against him. She’d always been a funny fish. Probably never see her again. Probably never see any of them again. Oh, well. End of it all.
At Waterloo he burrowed for his old man’s bus-pass and stood for a bus that crossed the bridge and turned towards the Temple. Taxi fares prohibitive and the drivers not pleasant any more. Mostly Polish immigrants. Very haughty. One had told him lately how the Poles had saved us in the War and then added, ‘Now we’re saving you for the second time. We work.’ He had not replied. For the second day running Fiscal-Smith made for the Strand and the Inns of Court.
Only twenty-four hours since the bell was tolling for Old Filth.
Different scene now. Earlier in the day.
