White Boots

by Noel Streatfeild

  The doctor, who knew about the shop, felt sorry and filled in the pause by saying “Quite.” Then suddenly he had an idea.

  “I’ll tell you what. How about skating? The manager of the rink is a patient of mine. I’ll have a word with him about Harriet. I’m sure he’d let her in for nothing. There’d be the business of the boots and skates, but I believe you can hire those.”

  Alec nodded.

  “You can. I think skating’s a good idea. If you can get your friend to give her a pass we’ll manage the boots and skates.”

  The doctor got up.

  “Good. Well, I’ve got to go and see the manager of the rink tomorrow; I’ll have a word with him; if he says yes I’ll arrange to pick Harriet up and drop her off and introduce her to him. It’s no distance, she could have a lot of fun there, plenty of kids, I imagine, go, it’s a big, airy place and she can tumble about on the ice and in no time we’ll see an improvement in those leg muscles.”

  George showed the doctor to the door. While he was out of the room Olivia said in a whisper:

  “Alec, whatever made you say it would be all right about the skates and boots? What do you suppose they cost?”

  Toby answered.

  “We know what it cost because we went that time Uncle William packed that goose by mistake. They’re two shillings a session.”

  Olivia never lost her air of calm, but she did turn surprised eyes on Alec. He was usually the sensible, reliable one of the family, not at all the sort of person to say they could manage two shillings a day when he knew perfectly well they would be hard put to it to find threepence a day. Alec gave her a reassuring smile.

  “It’s all right. I’ll find it, there’s a lot of delivering and stuff will want doing round Christmas and in the meantime I saw a notice in old Pulton’s window. He wants a boy for a paper round.”

  Olivia flushed. It seemed to her a miserable thing that Harriet’s skates and boots had to be earned by her brother instead of by her father and mother.

  “I wonder if I could get something to do? I see advertisements for people wanted, but they always seem to be wanted at the same time as I’m wanted here.”

  Alec laughed.

  “Don’t be silly, Mother, you know as well as I do you couldn’t do any more than you do.”

  Toby had been scowling into space; now he leant across to Alec.

  “How much do you suppose boots and skates cost? If a profit can be made on hiring out a pair of boots and skates at two shillings a session, how much would it cost to buy a second-hand pair outright?”

  Alec was doodling on his blotting paper.

  “With what?”

  At that moment George came back.

  “Nice fellow Phillipson, he says this skating will be just the thing for Harriet. It’s this skates’ and boots’ money that’s worrying me. Do you suppose we could do any good if we opened a needlework section, Olivia?”

  He was greeted by horrified sounds from Olivia, Alec and Toby. Olivia got up and put her arms round his neck.

  “I adore you, George, but you are an unpractical old idiot. You haven’t yet educated the public to come to you for trout, and be prepared at the same time to buy a bag of half-rotten apples, so how do you think you’re going to lure them on to supposing they would also like six dusters and an overall?”

  Alec looked up from his doodling.

  “What sort of needlework did you mean, Dad?”

  George looked worried.

  “Certainly not dusters and overalls. I seem to remember my grandmother doing some very charming things, fire-screens I believe they were.”

  Olivia laughed.

  “I’m not much of a needlewoman, and I can promise you even if I were to start today it would be two years before you would have even one fire-screen, so I think you can count the needlework department out.”

  Alec put a bundle of newspapers under the arm of the figure he was doodling.

  “It’s all right, Dad, I’m going to tide us over to start with by a newspaper round. Old Pulton wants somebody.”

  Toby had been doing some figures on paper.

  “If a newspaper boy is paid two shillings an hour, reckoning one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening daily for six days, with one hour on Sunday at double time, how long would it take him to earn second-hand boots and skates at a cost of five pounds?”

  Alec said:

  “If a boy and a half worked an hour and a half for a skate and a half…”

  Olivia saw Toby felt fun was being made of a serious subject.

  “I’m afraid,Toby, you’re going to grow up to be a financier, one of those people who goes in for big business with a capital ‘B’.”

  Alec finished his drawing.

  “It wouldn’t be a bad thing, we could do with some money in our family. If you were thinking, Toby, I might get Mr Pulton to advance five pounds for my services, it wouldn’t work because I might get ill or something and you’re too young to be allowed to do it.”

  “That’s right, darling,” Olivia agreed. “It wouldn’t be practical anyway to buy boots because Harriet’s growing, and probably the moment Alec had bought her the boots they’d be too small. Feet grow terribly fast at her age, especially when you’ve been ill. I wonder if she’s awake?”

  George got up.

  “I’ll go and see. If she is I’ll bring her down. It’ll cheer her up to know what’s planned for her.”

  Harriet was awake, and so was Edward. Edward was the good-looking one; his hair was not sandy like the rest of his family, but bright copper, his eyes were enormous with greenish lights in them. Strangers stopped to speak to Edward in the road just because they liked looking at him, and Edward took shameless pleasure in his popularity.

  “It’s disgusting,” Alec often told him. “You’re a loathsome show-off.”

  Edward was always quite unmoved, and merely tried to explain.

  “I didn’t ask to be good-looking, but I like the things being good-looking gives me. I was the prince in the play at school.” Toby, when he heard that, had made noises as if he were being sick. “All right, make noises if you like, but I did like being the prince. There was special tea afterwards, for the actors, with ices.”

  “But you can’t like people cooing and gurgling at you,” Toby always protested.

  Edward seemed to consider the point.

  “I don’t know. There’s you and Alec off to school and nobody knows you’ve been, and nobody cares. There’s me walks up the same street and everybody knows. I think it’s duller to be you.”

  “It’s no good,” Alec would say to Toby, “wasting our breath on the little horror.”

  “Just a born cad,” Toby would agree.

  But Edward was neither a horror nor a cad, he was just of a very friendly disposition, a person who liked talking and being talked to. Already, although he had only been seven for one month, he had a good idea of the sort of people he liked talking to and the sort of people he did not. He was explaining this to Harriet when George came up to fetch her.

  “It’s those silly sort of ladies with little dogs I don’t like, and people like bus conductors I do like.”

  George went into Edward’s room.

  “You’re supposed to be asleep, my son. Turn over and I’ll tuck you in. I’m taking Harriet downstairs.”

  Edward sat up.

  “What for? She’s supposed to be in bed and asleep too.”

  George pushed Edward down.

  “We’ve got something to tell her.” He could feel Edward rising up under his hand to protest that he would like to be told too. “Not tonight, old man, I dare say Harriet’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  It was a cold night, so George not only made Harriet put on her dressing-gown but he rolled her up in an eiderdown and carried her down to the sitting room. Harriet was surprised to find herself downstairs. She looked round at her family with pleasure.

  “Almost it’s worth being sent to bed with Edward to be got up again and
brought downstairs. What did Dr Phillipson say?”

  Olivia thought how terribly thin Harriet’s face looked, sticking out of a bulgy eiderdown. It made her speak very gently.

  “He wants you to take up skating, darling.”

  Nothing could have surprised Harriet more. She had been prepared to hear that she was to go for rides on the top of a bus, or do exercises every morning, but skating was something she had never thought about. George stroked her hair.

  “Dr Phillipson is arranging for you to get in free.”

  Alec said:

  “So the only expense will be the hiring of your skates and boots, and that’s fixed.”

  Toby looked hopefully at Harriet for some sign that she was working out the cost of skates and boots, but Harriet never worked out the cost of anything. She just accepted there were things you could afford and things you could not.

  “When do I start?”

  Olivia was thankful Harriet seemed pleased.

  “Tomorrow, darling, probably, but you aren’t going alone, the doctor’s going to take you.”

  Harriet tried to absorb this strange turn in her affairs. She knew absolutely nothing about skating; then suddenly a poster for an ice show swam into her mind. The poster had shown a girl in a ballet skirt skating on one foot, the other foot held high above her head, her arms outstretched. Thinking of this picture Harriet was as startled as if she had been told that tomorrow she would start to be a lion tamer. Could it be possible that she, sitting on her father’s knee rolled in an eiderdown, would tomorrow find herself standing on one leg with the foot of the other over her head? These thoughts brought her suddenly to more practical matters.

  “What do I wear to skate, Mummy?”

  Olivia mentally ran a distracted eye over Harriet’s wardrobe. She had grown so long in the leg since her illness. There was her school uniform, but that wanted letting down. There were her few frocks made at home. There was the winter party frock cut down from an old dinner dress which had been part of her trousseau. Dimly Olivia connected skating and dancing.

  “I don’t know, darling, do you think the brown velvet?”

  Harriet thought once more of the poster.

  “It hasn’t got pants that match, and they would show.”

  “She must match,” said Toby. “She’ll fall over a lot when she’s learning.”

  Olivia got up.

  “I must go and get our supper. I think tomorrow, darling, you must just wear your usual skirt and jersey; if you find that’s wrong we’ll manage something else by the next day.”

  George stood up and shifted Harriet into a carrying position.

  “Come up to bed, Miss Cecilia Colledge.”

  Harriet’s skating ceased to be a serious subject and became funny. Olivia, halfway to the kitchen, turned to laugh.

  “My blessed Harriet, what is Daddy calling you? It’s only for exercise, darling.”

  Alec drew a picture of Harriet on his blotting paper: she was flat on her back with her legs in the air. Under it he wrote, “Miss Harriet Johnson, Skating Star.”

  Toby gave Harriet’s pigtails a pull.

  “Queen of the Ice, that’s what they’ll call you.”

  George had a big rumbling laugh.

  “Queen of the Ice! I like that. Queen of the Ice!”

  Harriet wriggled.

  “Don’t laugh, Daddy, it tickles.”

  But when she got back to bed Harriet found that either the laughing or the thought of skating next day had done her good. Her legs were still cotton-woolish but not quite as cotton-woolish as they had been before her father had fetched her downstairs. Queen of the Ice! She giggled. The giggle turned into a gurgle. Harriet was asleep.

  Chapter Two

  MR PULTON

  ALEC CALLED ON Mr Pulton after supper. Mr Pulton had been born over the newspaper shop and so had his father before him, and likely enough rows of grandfathers before that. Nobody could imagine a time when Pulton’s newsagents had not been a landmark in the High Street. By luck, or because Pulton’s did not hold with meddling, the shop looked as if it had been there a long time. It was a little, low shop with a bow-fronted window, and there were the remains of some old bottle glass in one pane. Nobody knew Mr Pulton’s Christian name, he had always been just Mr Pulton to speak to, and C. Pulton when he signed his name. There was a lot of guessing as to what the C. stood for; local rumour had decided it was Carabas, like the marquess who was looked after by Puss in Boots. There were old men who were at school with Mr Pulton, who ought to have known his name, but they only remembered he had been called Pip Pulton. This was so unlikely a name for Mr C. Pulton that nobody believed the old men, and said they were getting on and had forgotten. It was true they were getting on, for anyone who had been at school with Mr Pulton was rising eighty.

  Alec went to Mr Pulton’s back door for the shop was closed. He knocked loudly for Mr Pulton was a little deaf. After a moment there was a shuffling, grunting, wheezing sound, and Mr Pulton opened the door. He was a very thin, very pale man. His hair was white, and so was his face, which looked as if it had been a face for so long that the colour had been washed out of it, and it had been battered around until it creased and was full of wrinkles. His hands were pale too, long and thin and spidery; he wore clothes that nobody had ever seen anyone else wear; a little round brown velvet cap with a tassel hanging down on one side and a brown velvet coat and slippers embroidered with gold and silver thread. His paleness and thinness sticking out of the brown skull cap and brown velvet coat made him look like a delicate white moth, caught in a rough brown hand. There was, however, nothing delicate or mothlike about Mr Pulton’s mind; that was as quick and as tough as a lizard. This showed in his extraordinarily blue, interested, shrewd eyes. His voice was misleading for it matched his body and not his mind. It was a tired voice, which sounded as if it had been used such a lot that it was wearing away. Mr Pulton looked at Alec and his eyes showed he was remembering who he was, and anything that he knew about him.

  “What can I do for you, young man?” Alec explained that he had come about the paper round. There was a long pause, not a pause of tiredness but a pause in which Alec could feel Mr Pulton was considering his paper round, and whether he was the sort of boy who could be trusted to deliver papers without bringing dishonour to Pulton’s Newsagents. Evidently his thoughts about Alec were nice, for suddenly he said a very surprising thing. “Come inside.”

  Alec had never been inside Mr Pulton’s house before, and neither, as far as he knew, had anybody else. He had often wanted to go inside, because leaning across the counter waiting for his father’s paper he had sometimes seen glimpses of a back room, which seemed to be full of interesting things. Now he was inside the room and he found it even more interesting than he had thought it might be. It was a brownish kind of room, so evidently Mr Pulton was fond of brown. There were brownish curtains, and brownish chair covers, and brownish walls. There was a gay fire burning, but in spite of it the room was dark because Mr Pulton had not yet got around to electric light, and could not be bothered with lamps, so he lit his home with candles, which gave a queer, dim, flickering light. In spite of the dimness Alec could see the room was full of pictures, and the pictures were all of horses, which was amazing, for nobody had ever thought of Mr Pulton as being interested in horses. There were dozens of portraits of horses: race-horses, hunters, shire horses, almost every sort of horse. As well on the top of a bookcase, on brackets and on tables there were bronze models of horses. It seemed such a very horse sort of room that Alec thought it would not be rude to mention it.

  “I say, what a lot of horses, sir.”

  Mr Pulton picked up a candle. He walked slowly round his walls, his voice took on a proud, affectionate tone, though it still kept its frail, reed-like quality.

  “Old Jenny, foaled a Grand National winner, she did. There he is, his portrait was painted the day after, so my father heard, you can see he was proud; look at him, knows he’s won the greatest test
of horse and rider ever thought of. That’s Vinegar, beautiful grey, went to a circus, wonderfully matched greys they were. Now there’s a fine creature, you wouldn’t know what he was – Suffolk Punch. It takes all sorts to make up a horse’s world, just as it takes all sorts to make our world; Suffolk Punches are country folk, simple in their ways, not asking much nor wanting changes. Now there’s a smart fellow: Haute École they call that, see his feet? That’s fine work, that is, takes a clever horse for High School.” He paused by a bronze cast of a horse which was standing on a small table. He ran his hand over the back of the cast as if it were alive. “You were a grand horse, weren’t you, old fellow? My grandfather’s he was; used to hunt him, he did. My father used to say you were almost human, didn’t he? Whisky his name was; clever, couldn’t put a foot wrong. And how he loved it. Why, there’s mornings now, especially at this time of year, when there’s a nip of frost in the air, and the smell of dropped leaves, I can fancy old Whisky here raising his head, and I can see a look in his eye as if he were saying ‘What’s keeping us? Wonderful morning for a hunt, let’s be off.’”

  Alec was so interested in the horses and the little bits of their history that Mr Pulton let drop, that he forgot the paper round, and it was quite a surprise to him when Mr Pulton, holding up his candle so that he could see Alec’s face clearly, said:

  “Why do you want my paper round? Not the type.”

  “Why not? I’m honest, sober and industrious.”

  Mr Pulton chuckled.

  “Maybe, but you haven’t answered my question. Why do you want my paper round?”

  Alec, though privately he thought Mr Pulton was a bit inquisitive, decided he had better explain.

  “Well, sir, it’s to hire boots and skates for my sister Harriet, who’s been ill and…”

  Mr Pulton held up a finger to stop Alec.

  “Sit down, boy, sit down. At my age you feel your legs, can’t keep standing all the time. Besides, I’ve got my toddy waiting in the fireplace. You like toddy?… No, course you wouldn’t. If you go through that door into my kitchen, and open the cupboard, you’ll see in the left-hand corner a bottle marked ‘Ginger wine’. Nothing like ginger wine for keeping out the cold.”