Ninepins

by Rosy Thorton

  ‘Yes.’ She glanced at Beth. ‘I’m sorry. I quite understand.’

  ‘And – ’ Miss Chapman fished in her handbag ‘ – she had these.’ With a flourish she produced a packet of cigarettes.

  Laura felt slightly sick.

  ‘It’s the end of term, and nearly Christmas, so I shan’t send her to the head of year for smoking. Just this once – but it must never happen again. Because you know, Mrs Blackwood, the school has a strict zero tolerance policy as far as cigarettes are concerned. It may be a rearguard action – some would say a lost cause – but we’re waging it with determination, nonetheless.’

  ‘Of course. And it really won’t happen again. I can’t imagine – ’

  ‘There’s one thing, though,’ said the music teacher, cutting through her attempted propitiation. ‘I’m afraid I can’t have Beth in the choir any more after this.’

  With neither a word nor a glance to Beth, and with renewed apologies and thanks to Miss Chapman, Laura somehow managed to propel herself and her daughter out of the practice room and back to the hall, where they collected an unspeaking Willow before trooping out to the car. The drive home was conducted in difficult silence, broken only by occasional remarks thrown by Laura to Willow in the passenger seat, brittly cheery, about the carols they had heard. As far as commensurate with safe driving, she avoided looking in her mirror.

  Once back at Ninepins, Willow fled like a rabbit for the stairs, leaving the kitchen clear for the showdown. Laura, whose wrath had been building to this moment, watched her departure and, perversely, almost lost heart. Oh, Beth. Sweetheart. Instead of flinging the cigarette packet on the table and demanding explanations, she sat down wearily in a chair.

  ‘Alice had to sing on her own,’ she began, her voice flat. ‘The rest of the choir hummed quietly, while she sang your verse by herself.’

  Still standing, Beth raised her chin. ‘Bet she was delighted. Everyone looking at her – s’what she loves.’

  This provoked a brief renewal of anger. ‘Don’t take this out on Alice. This is about you.’

  Eyes narrowed, Beth glowered at the wall behind her mother.

  ‘What have you got to say?’

  ‘ ’bout what?’

  ‘About letting Alice down, for a start. About being thrown out of the choir.’

  The chin jutted. ‘Stupid choir. Like I care about that. I was going to stop going anyway, after the concert.’

  ‘But you love singing.’

  ‘At the primary, that was. Nobody’s in the choir at the college.’

  Alice is, and Gemma, she wanted to say; but self-evidently the thirty or forty kids on the stage in their clean, white shirts, the boys in ties, were all still ‘nobody’. Rianna and Caitlin were not in the choir.

  ‘So, who were these other girls you were smoking with?’

  Silence. In her coat pocket, Laura’s right hand closed round the cardboard packet, still smooth in its cellophane. Half the cigarettes were gone; the packet gave under the pressure of her fingers, buckling out of shape. She squeezed her fist tight.

  ‘How could you smoke?’

  There was a short pause, before Beth muttered, ‘I wasn’t smoking.’

  The reply was not what Laura was expecting and for a moment she said nothing. Her daughter seemed to be mustering herself to speak.

  ‘I wasn’t. Not really. It was the others who were smoking. They’re not my cigarettes, I just had them in my pocket, that’s all, because Caitlin had taken them from her mum’s bag, so she didn’t want to be found with them on her or her mum would go mental. I’d hardly had any, not smoked one of my own at all, only had puffs of theirs, just to try. Everyone tries cigarettes. I bet you did, when you were young. Everyone does.’

  ‘Beth.’ Laura said it again, keeping her voice as even as she could, ‘How could you smoke? With your asthma. Even a few puffs. You must know it’s the worst possible thing.’

  Beth kicked out at a chair leg, viciously, making it judder. ‘Oh yes, it’s always my stupid bloody asthma, isn’t it? Always the reason I can’t do anything, have any fun.’

  ‘Smoking’s ‘‘fun’’, then, is it?’ But Laura knew this was a mistake: being drawn into argument, into the scoring of inconsequential points. She took a breath. ‘It’s not just your asthma. Of course it’s not only because of that.’

  ‘No.’ Beth’s voice was distorted, thick. ‘It’s ’cos you don’t like my friends. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You don’t want me having any friends.’ She was visibly crying now; her eyes bloated with liquid until they released two slow, fat tears. ‘You hate them, don’t you? Rianna and Caitlin – you hate them. You always have to spoil everything for me.’

  ‘I don’t hate …’

  Her daughter, however, had turned away and was stumbling for the hall and stairs, the sobs beginning only when she was out of the room. Walking over to the bin, Laura was surprised to find her legs quite steady. Nor was her hand shaking as she took out the crushed cigarette packet and dropped it in, letting the metal lid fall with the snap of finality. Beth was completely in the wrong. She’d been late for rehearsal; she’d let down her friend and the rest of the choir; she’d been caught smoking cigarettes. So why should it be Laura who was left with the aftertaste of misery and disgrace?

  Chapter 11

  Surfacing from sleep, Laura half opened her eyes. Then she remembered the date and closed them again. Christmas morning in alternate years still felt the way it should. It felt the way it had done when Beth was a baby, or when Laura was a child herself: the tingle of anticipation upon awakening. But this year, as in every year without Beth, it was just a cold December day with no need to get up for work. She pulled the duvet over her head and tried to recapture sleep.

  It was no good. A lifetime of jumping out of bed on this day of all days, to look for surprises left in the night, made lying in impossible. Christmas was still Christmas, even with an empty house. And besides, it wasn’t empty, was it, even if Beth’s room was.

  She pulled on socks, slippers and dressing gown and set off along the landing, past the unstirring spare room and down to the kitchen. It would have been too much, she’d decided, to creep in last night and leave the stocking of goodies at the foot of the spare bed. Willow had been up late, in any case, watching an old film on TV, and Laura had been in bed before her. But this morning was made for indulgences and she had no one else to indulge.

  In the cupboard she had a packet of marshmallows: not the usual fat, fluffy pink and white kind but miniature plugs of chocolate and vanilla, sold to top the cappuccino of those with an expensive steamed-milk coffee machine. She’d bought them for Beth, really, for her hot chocolate in bed tomorrow morning. But there was no harm in making the same for Willow today.

  Once the milk pan was on the hob to warm, she turned on the radio. The sound of congregational singing lapped into the kitchen, politely modulated and slightly nasal, unmistakably Church of England. … earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone. … Frowning, she smothered the thought that Beth’s school choir had sung it better. But even the recollection of the carol concert couldn’t damp her spirits for long this morning. She whisked up the cocoa powder and sugar in the mug with a light wrist and joined her voice softly as the invisible churchgoers reached the end of Christina Rossetti’s deathless poem. Give my heart.

  She poured in the hot milk and whisked it again before sprinkling on the marshmallows, which bobbed in the froth like tiny corks, then settled and began to blur and melt around the edges. Picking up the mug in one hand and Willow’s stocking in the other, she headed back upstairs, still humming to herself.

  There was no reply to her knock and Willow appeared to be asleep when she crept in. For a moment she was daunted, feeling foolish, but then Willow stirred and suddenly it was easy.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ she said, and grinned.

  ‘What’s this?’ Willow blinked and half raised herself on an elbow, and soon she was grinning, too. ‘Santa
Claus? And, wow – hot chocolate.’

  ‘I’ve got nobody else to spoil today.’

  The words, intended as apologetic, came out as grudging. But Willow’s smile was undented. ‘I’ll help you out, then.’

  After she had watched Willow unpack the contents of her stocking, and had herself opened the gift-wrapped paperback which Willow slid out from under the bed, she made them both a festive breakfast of porridge with cream and brown sugar, and oranges, and scrambled egg on toast. While Willow washed up, Laura called Simon’s house and said her Happy Christmases to Simon and Tessa and Beth.

  ‘It was brilliant, Mum. Dougie got under the tree, all in among the presents, and started making this growly noise and ripping the paper to bits. I think he smelled those chocolate reindeer we got for the boys. Everything got wrecked. It was hysterical – Dad couldn’t stop laughing.’

  Then there was the stuffing and bread sauce to make for tomorrow’s deferred Christmas dinner. Willow lingered to watch and Laura suggested she might like to do the brandy butter, which was usually Beth’s speciality.

  ‘I wouldn’t know how,’ protested Willow.

  ‘That’s OK. I can give you instructions. It’s very straightforward.’

  ‘No, honestly. But I can peel potatoes.’

  So Willow rolled up her sleeves and prepared the potatoes and parsnips and sprouts, and giggled like a little kid when Laura unconsciously began to hum I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus.

  ‘Do you think I should put the stuffing inside the bird or serve it in a separate dish?’ Laura asked her.

  The vegetable peeler halted. ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Well, the turkey takes longer to cook with it inside. But it depends if you think it tastes better.’

  The peeler resumed, gouging viciously at a parsnip. ‘Don’t ask me. My mother’s a bloody vegetarian.’

  Laura looked at her, curious at the sudden vehemence. ‘So, what then, you had nut roast, I suppose?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Willow.

  Preparing all that food had failed to give either of them an appetite for lunch, so Laura suggested a walk along the lode towards Elswell. The day was bright, lifting by a few degrees the night’s frost. The trodden earth of the path, though iron beneath, gave under their boots to a depth of a millimetre or so; the water of the lode might not be stone, but a lip of ice lined both banks and here and there in patches in midstream the surface had a treacherously glassy, criss-crossed look. On the north flank of the dyke, away from the sun, the tussocky grass still harboured pockets of white at its roots. Below the dyke to the garden side, the empty pumphouse, still waiting to dry out before renovation work could begin, sat stoical, its brickwork sheened in pearly grey.

  They walked side by side without speaking. Laura let her eye drift along the southern horizon, enjoying the uncluttered line of the land, the pale empty chill of the sky. Willow’s gaze was off to the north, where perhaps she might to be doing much the same. The fields between Ninepins and Elswell village were not large by the standards of the fens. The land to either side of the lode spread out in a patchwork of squares and strips, some ploughed to frozen clods, some harrowed and showing green with winter wheat, others lumpy with white-rimed beetroot and celery and cabbages. There were no hedges between the fields, which were demarcated only by smaller drainage ditches or simply by lines of yellow grass, toughened and slanted by the wind.

  Trees and shrubs were few, and grew mainly along the roads and farm tracks, where the ground was banked up above the wet. There were none of the usual stately trees that define the English countryside – no oak, beech, ash or horse chestnut – but only scrubby hawthorn and wild plum and the inevitable, ubiquitous willow.

  ‘You’ve got the right name for living round here,’ she said, breaking the long silence.

  The girl looked at her, uncomprehending.

  ‘Willow.’ She indicated a long row of it, edging a drove which zigzagged close to them on the north side. ‘There’s almost nothing but, in this part of the world.’

  ‘That’s willow? The one with the red branches?’

  ‘That’s right.’ That brilliant scarlet-orange of the willow rods, which was often the only spice of colour in the winter grey. ‘Willows love the damp. And their roots hold the soil together.’

  Willow’s eyes returned to scan the horizon. ‘Why are there no trees? No proper ones, I mean.’

  ‘Like oaks, say? Like the ones in the villages south of Cambridge?’ Where the land had contours, where the land was truly land. ‘How long does an oak tree take to grow? Two hundred, three, four, five hundred years? This place was only reliably reclaimed more recently than that. When those trees were saplings this place was still a marsh.’

  Listening, Willow nodded.

  ‘And think how deep their roots must need to go, some of those big trees. A hundred feet or more, perhaps. Here the water table is too high.’ She always imagined it there, the black water, lying just beneath the surface, waiting to take back its own – as it had on the night the pumphouse flooded. ‘They’d never survive. The soil is too waterlogged. It would rot them from below.’

  Laura was speaking largely to herself, doing little more than thinking aloud. Doubtless she was boring the poor kid. Though it didn’t appear that way, for Willow was looking thoughtful. ‘Waterlogged,’ she murmured, as if she, too, were speaking to herself.

  At the first of the brick cottages which marked the road and the beginnings of Elswell, they turned round by mutual consent and headed back the way they had come. On their outward course, Laura had been conscious of no breath of wind but now, turning back towards the east, she felt its sting on the bare skin of her face. Within a hundred yards, her eyes were blurred with tears and Willow’s, beside her, looked the same.

  ‘This is more like it,’ said Laura with a grin. ‘This is how a Christmas walk ought to be. Absolutely freezing.’

  Willow nodded but she didn’t smile. After a little way she said, ‘Can’t say I’ve been on one before.’

  ‘A walk on Christmas day?’

  The silence was affirmation.

  ‘It’s something we’ve always done. Just along the lode for some fresh air, while the turkey’s in the oven.’ When it was just she and Simon, before Beth was born, they used to eat their Christmas dinner in the evening to give them longer out of doors. One year they walked almost to Ely. ‘There’s never any shortage of it here. Fresh air, that is.’

  Presently, Willow said, ‘Janey wasn’t a big one for walking anywhere. She’d take the car to post a letter.’

  ‘How many Christmases did you have at her house?’

  ‘Two. It was OK, actually. Lots of people about, so plenty of laughs. And Janey could cook all right. She always did about six sorts of potatoes, so there was something everyone liked. Roast, and boiled, and mash, and chips.’

  ‘Chips with Christmas dinner?’

  Willow grinned. ‘You’d be surprised. Chips are the only thing some people will eat.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Ketchup as well as cranberry sauce?’

  ‘You bet.’

  Laura rubbed her gloved hands together, palm over knuckles, coaxing them to warmth. ‘It can’t have been easy, though, for some of the kids.’ For you, is what she meant.

  Willow did not respond. She was staring into the distance, where the lone grey square of Ninepins had risen into view.

  Gently, Laura pushed. ‘At Christmas, I mean, being away from their families.’ Thinking about past Christmases. Happy memories or unhappy ones: either way, it could only be painful.

  The reply, when it came, was gruff. ‘Bloody glad to be there, some of them.’

  And what about you? But it was too much. Of course she couldn’t ask it – any more than she could reach out and hook Willow’s hand under her arm, as she itched to do, and pull her nearer as they walked along.

  Instead, she tried another tack. ‘So you never went for walks at Christmas before that, either? With your mum?’

/>   She wondered if she had gone too far and alienated her companion, because Willow’s eyes remained fixed ahead and she didn’t reply. The rasp of her breathing in the cold air had ceased. Then quite suddenly she exhaled on a short, percussive sigh, which was half way to being a laugh.

  ‘It wasn’t like that. She didn’t really do Christmas.’

  That evening, when Laura had taken the car to go and fetch Beth home, Willow reached under the spare bed and took out the blue shoebox. It had dried out completely now. The cardboard had rehardened, slightly out of shape and more rigid than before, with long creases set into the sides and lid. Inside, the contents were all edged in blue where the colour had run from the box. She lifted out a handful at random. Unlike the box, the paper within seemed to have softened in the water and kept its softness as it dried, like tissue or fine blotting paper. Peeling apart the individual sheets without ripping them required slow patience, teasing apart the places where they were stuck. Where there was handwriting, the ink had blurred and fuzzed. Most of it, though, could still be read.

  The photographs had fared better. Their glossy surface may have repelled the moisture, their colours perhaps more securely fixed. One or two had glued themselves together, but the rest were intact.

  Methodically, she worked through the small stack of prints until she found the one she was looking for. It was taken on an old Instamatic camera her mother had once had, a junk shop relic of the 1970s. The picture was of Willow at the age of five or six, holding a camping kettle and squinting at the lens. On her head was a white denim sunhat.

  She recognised the room in which she stood only from the photograph. It was in Peterborough, she thought: a bedsit her mother had rented for a while. But although the background was familiar – the low, Formica-topped sideboard behind her younger self, the framed Van Gogh irises, the yellow wall – she could conjure nothing of the rest of the room. Nor could she remember the hall or stairway or the outside of the house, or any of the other tenants, but she knew there was a bus-stop at the end of the street, outside the shop with the photograph of the racehorse. A bookmakers, she now assumed. Back then it had never occurred to her to wonder what was inside the shop; she had only been entranced by the horse, which was taller than she was, almost the full height of the window, and which galloped towards her, suspended in motion with all its hooves off the ground at once.