by Julian Gloag
“It’s all right, isn’t it?” she asked.
Hubert nodded. “Yes, I think so.” In the garden a pigeon cooed.
She took a single sheet of paper out of the envelope and started to read. “Listen,” she said. “Last Will and Testament. I, Violet Edna Hook, of 38 Ipswich Terrace, being of sound mind, hereby bequeath: the lease on 38 Ipswich Terrace; all the furniture and contents of the house; the money in my post office savings bank; and all my personal effects to my dear children, Elsa Rosemary, Diana Amelia, Dunstan Charles, Hubert George, James McFee, Gertrude Harriet, and William John Winston, to be divided equally among them as they shall decide. I leave them also my blessing in confidence that all will cherish each other and in the hope that, having no other, they shall find continual solace and encouragement from the words and deeds of Our Heavenly Father. To my husband, Charles Robert Hook, I hope I can truly say I leave the forgiveness which one day I pray he will deserve and the love which he never used but as a sword to twist under my heart, yet which, despite all, I will always bear for him. Violet Edna Hook.”
The curtains flapped gently and the breeze stirred the white sheet hanging from the bed. High on the wall the patch of early sunlight had shifted slightly. Violet Edna Hook, thought Hubert; it didn’t sound like Mother. He walked over to the bed and looked down at the hidden form. Suddenly in his mind’s eye he saw the long sharp sword twisting and twisting in Mother’s flesh and splashes of darkred blood staining the white sheet. He turned his head away and, bending down, carefully tucked in the loose sheet.
“Else, how can love be a sword?”
Elsa smoothed the will in her hands. “I dunno.” She frowned. “You’re an odd one, Hu.”
“I wonder why Mother never told us we had a father,” he said.
“She did tell us—here,” she tapped the will, “and anyway she told me. An’ I told you—we don’t really have a father. You mustn’t mind, Hu. Mother said it doesn’t make any difference. You don’t mind, do you? I don’t. I promised Mother I didn’t mind.”
Hubert said slowly, “He must have been a beast.”
“Yes,” she said eagerly, “that’s right. He is a beast.”
“You don’t think—you don’t think we ought to tell him about Mother?”
“Of course not!”
“Do any of the others know, Else? Does Dinah?”
“Just you and me.”
From upstairs came a burst of shouts from one of the children. They’ll all be up soon, thought Hubert.
“You won’t tell, will you, Hu?” she enquired anxiously.
He shook his head. “Noooo,” he said, sounding doubtful.
“Please, Hu. You’re on my side, aren’t you? Please don’t tell—please!”
He saw her plain, rather pointed face, and the earnestness of her eyes and mouth. Elsa the strong one was begging him. The feeling he’d had all morning came up inside him, a great emptiness, as if something that had always been there—perhaps it was his heart—had fallen out and left a big hole. “No,” he said, “I won’t tell.”
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.” He raised his hand and made the sign of the cross over the emptiness in his chest.
Elsa nodded, satisfied. She slipped the will into the proper pigeonhole and closed the desk. “We’re going to have a meeting after dinner—all of us.”
“Why?”
“To decide things—we got a lot to decide.”
“Well, why don’t we have it after breakfast?”
Elsa looked at him, and she was strong and authoritative again now. “Because we got our chores to do. I got to do the shopping and get the money out of the post office and—oh—millions of things to do.”
“And I got to clean the front room and the sitting room.”
“That’s right. So we’ll have the meeting after dinner.”
“We can’t stop doing things just because … I mean we got to go on doing things, haven’t we?”
“Yes. We got to go on.”
As Elsa spoke, both of them heard a tiny sound from the door. It was the handle being turned from the outside. Squeaking gently, it turned and slipped back and then began to turn again.
“Who could it be?” Hubert whispered.
Then suddenly it clicked and the door swung inwards. Willy tumbled into the room.
“Willy!” said Elsa.
The little boy smiled at her and then grew serious. “You must go away,” he said, pointing at Elsa and then at Hubert.
“Elsa and Hubert must go away. I want to talk to Muvver.”
Hubert stepped forward. “You can’t do that, Willy. It’s nearly breakfast time—let’s go and have breakfast.” He tried to take Willy’s hand.
Willy shifted towards the bed. “Muvver always talks to me before brea’fast. You go away.”
“Willy, you can’t.” Hubert advanced quickly and caught the little boy in his arms.
“Let me go!” He struggled fiercely. “Muvver,” he called, “Tell Hu to let me go!”
“Mother can’t hear you, Willy.” He lifted the boy in his arms. Willy hit out as hard as he could, banging his fists at Hubert’s face.
“Muvver, Muvver!” he screamed. “They’re taking me away. Muvver!”
Elsa ran forward and gripped his arms. “Stop it, Willy. Stop it at once!” And Hubert felt the little body become tight and still in his arms.
Willy stared up at Elsa. His face was white. He drew in his breath and held it as he stared and stared at her.
“That’s better, now,” she said, letting go of his arms. “Take him downstairs, Hu.”
As Hubert began to move, Willy let all the air out of his lungs at once in a great wail. “Muvver,” he wailed—and his cry filled the house so that upstairs the other children stopped what they were doing and the next moment were running down the stairs.
“Take him down, Hu,” Elsa said.
“Muvver,” came the wail again. Hubert gripped the child more closely and carried him from the room. The children stood in the passage, looking with big eyes as he brushed past them.
“Muvver! Muvver!”
All down the stairs the cry was repeated and repeated. It echoed round inside him with a thousand voices. It was not just Willy’s cry; it was his own, and Elsa’s, and the cry of his brothers and sisters watching white-faced at the top of the stairs.
It seemed to Hubert that he would give anything in the whole world to stop the little boy’s wail.
7
He caught the back of the swing, lifted it and sent it spinning down. Up it went till Willy’s toes brushed the leaves of the apple tree. Then down and back again.
“Five,” said Hubert as he sent it down again.
“Higher, higher!” screamed Willy.
“Six!”
Gerty tugged at his shirt. “It’s my turn now, Hu.” She bounced beside him.
Up and down. Ten times each, and then he had to go back indoors to his job.
Filtered through the leaves, the sun played dances on the shaggy lawn. The spring grass needed cutting, but that job didn’t begin till the end of May. Yet already it felt more like summer. In the next-door garden Mr. Halbert was standing on his stepladder clipping the hedge. Every now and again he would stop and brush an imaginary leaf off his bald head. What a head it was—it gleamed, magnificent in the sun. Hubert wondered whether it was true that Mrs. Halbert polished it every night with Mansion polish. No wonder old Halby took such care of it. He bent forward and clipped, and grunted, and paused, and patted his head. Clip, grunt, pause, pat.
No one had ever heard old Halby speak—except just to say good morning in a gruff way. But that was in the morning, when they were on their way to school, and Halby looked quite different then, with his bald head protected by a bowler hat. Don’t talk to strangers, unless you’ve been introduced, Mother always said. Perhaps Halby felt the same way.
“Now it’s my turn, Hu,” said Gerty anxiously.
“Eigh
t!” said Hubert. “Two more to go, Gert.”
The Halberts’ garden was neat and dapper, not like their own. It had pruned rose bushes and the lawn was cut in loops and circles with a wooden arbour in one corner and lots of neat little box hedges. Halby even had a sprinkler which made a steady whoosh-whoosh as it went round and round. Sometimes in the summer Hubert went up to his room in the afternoon and looked down on the Halberts having tea in their garden. Mr. Halbert read the paper and Mrs. Halbert sewed. They never said much. It was a waste really—that lovely garden—when all they ever did in it was to read and sew.
Read and sew. Sew and read. Up and down. “Ten,” cried Hubert.
“It’s me now, it’s me!”
“All right, Gerty.” As Willy dropped to the ground, Hubert put his hands under Gerty’s plump armpits and hoisted her onto the seat. “I can go higher than Willy ’cause I’m older, can’t I, Hu?”
“We’ll send you high as a kite, old Gert.” He lifted her back and let go. “Mind the bricks, Willy,” he called.
The bricks were piled precariously at the edge of what Mother had promised them was to be a proper sunken garden. Now it was just a big square ragged hole in the middle of the lawn. Mr. Stork had come every Thursday and spent all winter digging it. He’d seeded it at the beginning of March and soon he was going to start lining the sides with bricks—old yellow bricks that he’d got cheap some where. None of the children liked Mr. Stork—or Mrs. Stork, who came to do the cleaning, either. “The old Talk-Storks,” they called them. Both Mrs. Stork and her husband—“my Tiger”—loved to chatter and, particularly, to ask lots of questions. The only good thing about them, Mother said, was that they were cheap. I know more about flying aeroplanes than Stork knows about gardens.
Stork and talk. Talk and Stork. Up and down. “Six,” said Hubert, pushing hard down again.
He closed his eyes for a moment and felt the pre-summer warmth all around him. He caught the faintest scent of lilies of the valley. He opened his eyes and looked at the ordered ranks of the lilies as they lay in the dark shade of the house. Only the lilies would not have disgraced the Haiberts’ garden. Automatically Hubert glanced up to Mother’s room and then up to the room he and Dunstan shared. He was just in time to see a white face disappear from the window. It must be Dunstan, he thought. And he felt suddenly chilled. It had happened before that he would be absorbed, usually making something in his workshop, and he would turn round and there would be Dunstan watching him. “Just watching,” Dunstan would say when asked, or sometimes, “A cat may look at a king.”
“Ten—that’s all, Gert.” He slowed the swing.
“Can’t I go on by myself, Hu?”
“Oh, all right then, but don’t fall off.”
He looked up high in the sky and blinked away the dizziness of swinging. There were three or four fluffy white clouds coming up. He sighed. He didn’t want to go indoors and leave the garden and the sun and the swinging. It would be chilly in the house. But there was a lot to do—and after dinner, the meeting.
Willy was making a little subsidiary pile of bricks. With great intentness he fetched and placed them, making sure first that they weren’t cracked or broken. For a brief instant the wish that he could be like Willy crossed Hubert’s mind. He dismissed it, but as he walked towards the back door, he wondered whether they would ever have a sunken garden now. The thought was like a little hand squeezing inside him.
Over in the next-door garden old Halby’s clippers went click-click.
8
“… no one—not even your best friend. Do you understand?”
“Can’t I tell Miss Deke?” asked Gerty.
“No. Not Miss Deke, nor anyone.” Elsa surveyed them all sitting round the table. “You know what they’ll do if they find out? Do you know, Dun?”
Dunstan stared at her as though he had some secret knowledge, but all the same he just shook his head.
“Well, I know,” said Elsa. “They’ll take us away. They’ll take us away and put us in a home!”
There was no sound in the kitchen and the children lowered their eyes as if they had been found out at last.
“What’s a home?” Gerty asked timidly.
“It’s a place that has bars on the window. Big iron bars, so you can’t get out. And you’re not allowed to go outside except when they say. And they whip you. They whip you with whips, even if you’re the teeniest bit naughty. And they never give you enough to eat. They put the little girls in one place and the little boys in another place and you’re not allowed to talk or they’ll whip you.”
“Is it like a loony b-bin?” Jiminee asked.
“Worse.”
“Why’ll they put us in a home?” asked Gerty.
“Because we’re orphans, silly.” She paused for a moment, and then said impressively, “It’s called an institution.”
“Institution,” sibilantly the word was murmured.
“So we mustn’t let anyone know—except for us. Not even the—funeral man.”
“Undertaker,” said Dunstan.
“Undertaker then. No one. If we do, they’ll tell. Any grownup will tell. We got to do everything ourselves.” Her voice rose higher. “We got to look after Mother ourselves. We got to bury Mother ourselves.”
They listened with pure attention. Elsa went on with a quick trembling rush of words: “We’re going to bury her in the garden. We’re going to do it tonight, when no one can see. Not old Halby, nor no one. We’ll dig a grave and put her in the garden. That’s where she’d like to be. In the garden where she can rest in peace and where—and where—”
“Where she can watch over us,” Diana softly put in.
“Yes, where she can watch over us. That’s right—isn’t it, Hubert?”
“Yes,” he answered reluctantly, “I suppose that’s where she’d like to be.”
“We’ll bury her among the lilies,” Diana said. Hubert gazed at her, surprised at her confidence—she who was always the least talkative of all. “Like it says in the Book—among the lilies. Then we’ll know all the time she’s there.”
Jiminee shifted in his seat. “How can she be there if she’s d-dead?”
“Her body,” said Hubert.
Diana smiled. “No, not just her body. All of her. Mother is with us all the time. We must never forget that. She’s in this room with us at this very moment. How could she leave us? We’re her children. She’s here.” She closed her eyes and lifted her head a little so the gold hair fell back from her face. “You’re here, aren’t you, Mother?”
Willy banged his fist on the table. “Mother! Where’s Mother?”
Diana opened her eyes. “She’s here, little Willy.”
“Where are you, Mother? I don’t see Mother. Dinah, I don’t see Mother.”
“But she’s here just the same, Willy. That’s why you must be extra specially good.”
“How long for?”
“Why, for always. Mother is always with us now.”
Willy frowned. “Doesn’t she ever go to sleep?”
“Not anymore, Willy.”
Willy turned his head this way and that. “I don’t believe you, Dinah. You’re fibbing. Mother’s not here.”
“Yes, where is she, D-Dinah?” said Jiminee earnestly. “How d-do you know she’s here?”
“Because I feel it,” Diana answered serenely. “Because I have faith.”
“I feel it too.” Dunstan clenched his fist. “Willy and Gerty are just too little to feel it, that’s all.”
“I do feel it, I do, I do,” asserted Gerty.
“So do I,” said Willy.
Dunstan gave a humourless grin and shrugged. “All right. Everyone feels it. You do, don’t you, Hubert?”
He didn’t like it—Dunstan had no right to do this sort of thing—but he was cornered. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said.
“You suppose so?” echoed Dunstan.
“Oh, all right. I do, then.” If it hadn’t been for Diana, he wouldn’t let him
self be bullied like this.
“And Elsa, of course, Elsa—”
Diana smiled. “I’m sure Elsa knows just as well as we do that Mother is with us. And Jiminee too.” Her voice had the same gently inexorable confidence as an autumn breeze detaching leaves from the trees. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
Like the leaves, the children uneasily whispered their assent.
“Well,” said Elsa, “now let’s be sensible.”
“Sensible!” shouted Dunstan.
“Oh, Elsa,” said Diana.
Hubert took a deep breath. “What Elsa means is that we’ve got—got to get down to brass tacks. That’s it, isn’t it, Elsa? Talk never baked a cake. We’ve got to have a plan, and we’ve got—”
“That’s right. There’s a lot of things to do and it’s no use us just sitting here and chattering and—and things.” She gathered strength. “We’ll start at midnight—that should give us lots of time, an’ we’ll take turns. Gerty and Willy are too young to do the digging, so they’ll have to go to bed. And there’s another thing—we must all get plenty of rest this afternoon, so we’ll be strong for tonight.”
“Midnight,” Jiminee said, “g-gosh!”
Elsa stood up. “If there’s anything we haven’t thought of, we can decide that tomorrow. Of course, from now on, we’ll be having meetings more often.”
She had started to turn away when Dunstan said, “You don’t show much respect, do you, Elsa?”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t show much respect, that’s what I mean. Who gave you the right to settle everything? Who gave you the right to decide? You’re not Mother.”
Hubert leaned forward. “Who is going to decide then—you, bookworm?”
Dunstan whitened. For a moment he said nothing; when he did speak it was with a dignity the children had not seen before. “We’re not going to get anywhere by calling each other names, Hubert. I should think you ought to know better.”
“Well, you called me names,” Elsa said.
“I didn’t call you names. I just asked,” Dunstan paused, “I just asked who gave you the right to decide everything. You don’t even ask us anything, do you? Meetings never used to be like this. We all decided—all of us. I’m right, aren’t I, Hu?”
