Opposite the Cross Keys

by S. T. Haymon

  ‘I – I don’t know. I saw him undoing his belt. I didn’t wait to see.’

  ‘Oh ah.’ A long puff on the pipe. Then: ‘This was when – Wednesday?’ I nodded. ‘You bin to ask how she is?’

  I hung my head as I admitted that I had not. I did not know how to explain my craven need to distance myself from that flashing length of leather which had invaded my dreams, that silver buckle catching the light of the setting sun as it found its target again and again.

  ‘Well …’ said Mr Fenner, taking his pipe out of his mouth. In that one word he made me aware that things were going to get better from then on. ‘Bugger me if I know what the fuss is about. Don’t your pa never give you a belting?’

  ‘Of course not! He’d never do anything like that!’

  ‘Oh ah?’ Mr Fenner considered, then offered, ‘Maybe it’s on account of he’s a gent. Can’t be because you’re a little angel, ’ cause we know better, don’t we? Or maybe it’s on account o’ being eddicated, he don’t need to. He’s got the language. We country bors, not being what you would call civilized, we have to make do with our hands. It’s all we got.’

  ‘But it’s so cruel!’

  ‘Is it now?’ Mr Fenner’s blue eyes twinkled. ‘You ever asked Maud how many times her cruel ole pa clouted her over the lughole when she was a kid getting above herself, which was seven days outer seven, on the average? You ask her – hear what she says.’

  I felt confused. Nobody needed to tell me that Maud loved her father with a love devoid of reservations. I believe that even then, young as I was, I sensed that at least part of the reason why her pathetic little attempts at love affairs came to their premature, unconsummated conclusions was that the love object of the moment never came within miles of coming up to her pa.

  I felt even more confused when the iron gate to the allotments creaked open and Nellie Smith came in, looking terrible, with one eye shut and empurpled, a bump on her left temple, and the spaces between the chickenpox scabs, which seemed to have held to their places with undisturbed equanimity, filled in with claw marks which looked as if they had been made by a wild beast or the spike of a large buckle – or possibly both. At the sight of that small, damaged face I felt a powerful urge to run to Nellie Smith, my friend; put my arms round her, speak words of comfort. At the same time I wanted to run a mile.

  In the event, I was spared a decision between those incompatible alternatives. The girl approached the shed with quick, purposeful steps, bent over the basin at our feet, and helped herself to a carrot.

  As she stood biting into it, showing a gap in her upper jaw where one of her middle teeth was missing, Mr Fenner said in a friendly way, ‘Glad to hear you say please,’ whereupon Nellie Smith tossed the carrot back into the basin with, ‘Keep yer mouldy carrot!’

  Mr Fenner observed, ‘I begin to see why yer pa give you a belting. Waited longer than he should’ve.’

  ‘My dad thinks the world of me!’

  ‘Oh ah? Funny way he’s got o’ showing it.’

  ‘The world of me!’ the other repeated. ‘An’ I think the world of my dad!’

  What I had failed to notice among all the evidences of her hurt was that Nellie Smith was bursting with self-satisfaction. She barely noticed me, save as an audience. Any other audience would have done as well.

  ‘A king o’ men!’ she insisted, whirling round so that her skirt flared out in a circle. ‘What you think? That snotty-nose PC Utting come into the camp an’ wanted to fetch him down to the nick. Sauce! I told him I fell out of a tree, not that he believed a word of it, but what could he say? He said people half a mile down the road heard me screeching.’ The girl giggled. ‘“I got a loud voice,” I said, “an’ it were a high tree.”’

  She was wearing yet another dress: spotted muslin, full in the skirt but nearer her size this time, which made me realize for the first time how thin she was, a matchstick girl, no thickness to her at all, almost. The dress had short puffed sleeves, the skinny arms they revealed nearly as clawed as her face. She waved them about as if she wanted to draw them to our attention.

  ‘“In that case,” the copper says, “I’ll get an ambulance out here, take you into casualty, make sure there’s no bones broken.” I told him what he could do with his sodding ambulance! Did we laugh, when he’d gone off with his tail between his legs! Reckon he could have heard that half a mile down the road and all!’

  With a sudden movement, like a dancer in a cancan, she flung the back of the muslin skirt up and over her shoulders. To my shocked surprise she was wearing absolutely nothing underneath, unless the still-angry weals which criss-crossed her back and buttocks could be considered something.

  She let the dress fall.

  ‘Couldn’t ’a gone to the hospital an’ let ’em seen that, could I?’ she asked cheerfully, not making it clear whether it was the weals or the absence of underwear to which she referred. ‘Anyways, the old un plunked some stuff on, took the sting out afore you could say knife.’

  ‘Oh, Nellie!’ I got out at last, and burst into tears.

  ‘What the hell’s got into her?’ demanded Nellie Smith.

  Chapter Thirteen

  We sat on the bank in the cowslip meadow dabbling our feet in the Sal. In the field behind us buffcoloured cows lay about in the sun, whisking their tails every now and again. You could never have guessed what apricot-scented treasure the field harboured in its proper season. I wondered if Nellie Smith would be there next spring to pick cowslips with me.

  I must have mentioned something of the sort, because she said, ‘I dunno,’ with no special feeling and as if anywhere was the same as any other where.

  Feeling sorry for my rootless friend, I asked, didn’t she miss having a home, a real home stuck fast to the ground so it couldn’t be moved.

  The answer was a laugh that sounded more of a jeer.

  ‘Rather be a bloody tree, you mean, stuck where you grow, ’stead of having legs to go wherever you want to?’ Without waiting for a reply, she went on, ‘You heard of a place called Ancient Greece an’ Rome?’

  Taken aback by this sudden turn of the conversation, I nevertheless admitted that I had heard of it.

  ‘Well, then! That were full of houses, weren’t it? Big uns – palaces. They had a book in school wi’ pictures. Pictures of what’s left: bit o’ wall here, a couple of pillars there, or a statue of a man wi’ no clothes on. Not all of him neither. Tha’s what happens to places stuck in the ground. Sooner or later they fall down or get broke up, an’ all what’s left in the end is a pile of rubbish for the gypsies to pick over.’ Nellie Smith regarded me with more disdain than pity. ‘You’ll see. Except I shouldn’t think as you’ll be there to see it. It takes time, ruins does. But sooner or later there won’t be no St Awdry’s any more, nor Norwich, nor nowhere folk live in houses. But us gypsies’ll just get ourselves into our caravans an’ drive off whistling!’

  I was silent, mulling over what she had just said – or not really mulling, it was too hot: letting the prospect of the down-fall of civilization swish over me like the swallows which kept swishing past, up and down the air, hawking for flies. Since the episode of the spring the relationship between Nellie Smith and me had at once deepened and become more fragile. I had enjoyed the delights, now I understood the dangers, of calling someone friend.

  Together, children though we were, we had accomplished something powerful: we had actually influenced, not to say decided, the course of events in that adult world, which, closely as it impinged on our own, was normally outside our ordering. They pointed us along the way we had to go, like it or not. For once, we had pointed them.

  The old un had been dead right about the efficacy of virgin spring water. The beautiful Miss Lee had not reappeared in St Awdry’s since her drenching. Her cheerful little sports car was no longer seen in the gypsy encampment. Nellie Smith’s father, once he had finished beating up his daughter, had taken off for Norwich, and returned tipsy and morose. Since then, according to Nell
ie, he had not been anywhere; spent his days sitting on his caravan steps drinking beer and looking so defeated that, if you didn’t know the truth of it, and if it hadn’t been for Nellie’s weals and bruises, slow to heal, you might have thought it was she who had belted him instead of the other way round.

  How I wished, when the occasion called for it, that the spring water might work in reverse – instead of separating lovers, bring them together! Maud had come down to St Awdry’s the Sunday before looking very down in the mouth. That is, to the uninitiated eye she looked the same as usual, except for her wart, which I knew to be an infallible barometer of her inmost feelings. When Maud was in her usual humour it sat pat on the ridge of her nose; but when she was melancholy it flopped sideways, limp as a wind sock when there wasn’t any wind. The Sunday before, it had flopped all over the place.

  I did not have to ask the cause because I knew it already. Just as I had had a hand in the banishment of Miss Lee, so – though in that case not deliberately – was I in part responsible for the collapse of the most recent of Maud’s affairs of the heart.

  The latest object of her affections was a young man named Eric, who was some kind of distant cousin of the Fenners’; an awful weed, I thought, but glamorous at twenty paces because he was a soldier. Maud and I used to wait for him outside Wellington Barracks, at the end of Riverside Road: and when he came along, stepping smartly out of the gate in his dress uniform of red tunic, blue trousers and hat with a white band and a shiny peak, he looked marvellous – until he was close enough for you to see his stupid face, which bore a marked family resemblance to Ellie’s.

  Maud, as always, came provided with Woodbines and packets of slab chocolate – gifts which he grabbed with scant grace. Though she coloured prettily at sight of him, even to my partial eye she looked, in her frumpish costume and hat, more like his maiden aunt than his girl friend; and Eric, for his part, always did his best to hurry her away from the Barracks, up the road towards Mousehold Heath, as if he did not want his mates to see whom he was walking out with.

  Eric wasn’t very nice to me, either, which irked me, for I was comfortable in my role of little charmer. Looking back, though, I realize that the surprising thing was that Maud – as she did with all her beaux – took me along at all. Was I her ultimate insurance against what might otherwise befall up the road, in some secret hollow of the Heath, where the spicy smell of the gorse and the heather, titillating the senses beyond bearing, might seduce even a virtuous young woman with a wart on her nose into forgetting in a moment of madness that marriage or nothing was what she held firmly in mind?

  A little before I came down with chickenpox my father had brought home a kite from his weekly lesson with Mr Lee: a Chinese paper kite, shaped like a bird such as had never flown on land or sea, a bird with a scaly neck and a cruel, imperious head crowned with jewels made out of coloured tinfoil which flashed in the sun. My mother had wanted to hang it up on the wall as a decoration, it was so beautiful and so frail, but my father had insisted that if Chinese children could fly such kites, so, surely, could I.

  As it happened, I had not, to date, had much success even with the English variety; and for days I waited impatiently for either my father or Alfred to find the time to come Chinese kite-flying with me, both to provide assistance and, if necessary, to be there to take the blame if the fabulous bird, for its own inscrutable, Oriental reasons, refused to take to the air.

  In Norwich the place par excellence for kite-flying was a knife-edged excrescence called St James’s Hill which, as it happened, was just across the road from the Barracks. All the same, and even besotted by love, it was rash of Maud to assert so confidently, ‘Eric’ll fly it for you.’

  Whilst I lacked her trust in the youth, I was seized with desire to see my Chinese kite soaring into the English empyrean. I could not bear to wait a moment longer. After all, I reassured myself, if a soldier trained to guard the British Empire couldn’t fly a simple thing like a kite, who could?

  ‘Wha’s that, then?’ Eric asked in his surly way, when he came out of the Barracks. Even he, stupid as he was, must have seen very well that it couldn’t possibly be anything but a kite.

  ‘A kite,’ I answered nevertheless, putting on my winsome smile. ‘Maud said you’d help me fly it.’

  Eric looked more human than I had ever known him.

  ‘A kite!’ he echoed, rosy with pleasure. ‘A ruddy kite!’

  The wedge-shaped end of St James’s Hill was sandy and of gentler gradient than its slippery, grass-covered sides. The three of us toiled up it to the top, aglow with anticipation. Though I balked at letting him carry the kite, I decided that Eric was not so mouldy after all.

  At the top of the hill a brisk breeze was blowing. It was agreed that Maud, being taller than I, would hold the bird up ready for the take-off whilst Eric, taking charge of the reel, tweaked it into the air. When it was safely up and away he would hand over to me and I could carry on from there, flying my kite.

  It was a sensible arrangement, yet I passed over the bird and the reel with foreboding. The two of them, it seemed to me, giggling and nudging each other in the soppy way of lovers, lacked the gravitas which marked out the dedicated kite-flyer. Still, the plan worked. The bird swooped upward as if it couldn’t wait to get airborne, and hung there, so magnificent with its spread wings and flashing jewels that we all three cried out, ‘Ah!’ involuntarily, the way one does when rockets burst into stars at a fireworks display.

  Unfortunately for us, there was one other spectator, equally transported. A dog, a pure-bred mongrel the size of a donkey and of roughly the same coat and colour, had come bounding up the slope to see what we were up to. Still a puppy for all its dimensions, it was, I reckon, already old enough to have discovered that its size was a barrier to social acceptance because it did not approach us directly, but lay down a little further along the ridge, nose between paws, following our every movement with absorbed attention.

  When the Chinese bird flew, however, it was too much. I cannot, of course, profess to know what the dog had in mind. I can only guess that, colour-blind as dogs are stated to be, this was nevertheless a dog with an aesthetic sense who, sighting an object of such beauty overhead, reached for it as a child might stretch out its tiny hand to grasp a bright bauble, instinctively.

  Except that, being a dog, and a donkey-sized dog at that, it was no tiny hand. Suddenly, with a throaty roar, the animal took an almighty leap, all four feet off the ground as it reached for the swaying loveliness intolerably out of reach.

  The details of what happened next are entangled in my memory like the kite cord itself. In a matter of moments the dog and Eric, conjoined in yards of cord, the Chinese bird plummeting out of the sky to land on top of them, rolled over twice on the narrow path which ran along the top of the ridge, and disappeared from sight over the edge.

  Maud screamed. I think, though I can’t be sure, that she screamed, not ‘Eric!’ but ‘The kite!’ We ran to the easy way down, and then round the base of the hill to where we found Eric sitting up and furious, and the dog biting pieces out of the remains of the paper bird with the tentative air of a wine taster trying out an unknown vintage. Both man and dog, though now separate entities once more, were bound about by odds and ends of kite cord, long strands of which festooned the hillside in a most untidy way.

  ‘Look at that, will yer!’ Eric shouted at sight of us, pointing to the grass stains on his red tunic and white webbing belt. I went and retrieved his cap from some distance off. It was a sorry sight.

  ‘Look at that!’ Eric sounded beside himself. I no longer thought he wasn’t so mouldy. He was mouldy in the extreme. ‘They’ll dock me for that! Christ knows what they’ll dock me! You an’ yer fucking kite!’

  Had he cracked his skull or broken a leg I am sure Maud would have fallen upon his breast with loving lamentations. As it was, she said coldly, ‘None of your bad language in front of the child, if you please!’

  Eric rounded on her.
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  ‘You! You stupid old fart!’

  Maud reddened, but said nothing. She fumbled in her handbag, bringing out an envelope which I recognized as one of those into which, with a delicacy appreciated by both, my mother always put her weekly ten shilling note. Maud handed it to Eric with a sniff.

  ‘Tha’s for paying back the Army to get you clean. Tell ’em to wash your mouth out while they’re about it.’ She snapped the bag shut and took me by the hand. ‘Come on, Sylvie. Nex’ time we got a kite to fly, we’ll make sure to pick a gentleman.’

  We walked back to the tram terminus, both of us, I think, more exhilarated than sad. This was life! The dog followed a little behind and tried to get on the tram with us. I wouldn’t have minded taking it home if the conductor had allowed it on, but Maud snapped, ‘Don’t be daft!’ and the world, like the tram presently, began to run on its accustomed rails again.

  When Maud turned up at St Awdry’s looking out of sorts, I knew she must be grieving, not that mouldy Eric was out of her life, but that, weeks after, she still had not found anybody to replace him.

  ‘Never mind,’ I whispered, when I got the chance. None of the Fenners seemed to have noticed that anything was the matter; or if they had, hadn’t said. ‘When I get back to St Giles we’ll take a nice walk to the cemetery, like we always do. That will make you feel better.’

  She made no reply, but gave me a hug that, even though I couldn’t see anything morally against killing two birds with one stone, made me feel a bit guilty. I hadn’t mentioned anything about wanting to go to the cemetery on my own account – to wit, to see for myself the grave of Mrs Smith, the gypsy princess.

  After a while we took our feet out of the stream and let them dry in the sun. Nellie Smith’s legs were longer than mine, but her feet were smaller, high-arched: the right kind for a princess’s daughter. Her face, still bruised, still scabbed with my chickenpox, looked less patrician, her black curls positively nihilistic. But her feet were beautiful. The sight of them made me feel emotional. I hated to see them vanish into the boots, several sizes too large, into which she usually poked them.