Opposite the Cross Keys

by S. T. Haymon

  I can go back to Chicken.

  The Saturday after that momentous afternoon, Mrs Fenner came up to Norwich positively quivering with news of the lovely bor who had moved into the cottage next door. Not even Maud’s natural scepticism, which made her instantly retaliate that nobody who could bring himself to set up home in that rat hole could be up to much, could moderate her mother’s enthusiasm.

  ‘Jest you wait till you see him!’ she prophesied. ‘You’ll be same as the rest of us – wondering how we ever got along without him.’

  His name, she told us, was Chicken.

  ‘Chicken!’ Maud echoed derisively. ‘What kind of name is that?’

  ‘In’t it a laugh?’ Mrs Fenner’s face shone with an innocent love. ‘But arter you’ve known him a day or two it seem to fit, somehow, an’ you couldn’t think of a better if you tried.’

  ‘Wha’s so special about him, then?’ Maud, who was still getting over the defection of Curly, the pirate bus driver, who had just been run in for bigamy, spoke out of disillusion with all male mankind. ‘Got two wings an’ crows every time he lays an egg?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ Mrs Fenner returned comfortably.

  Next day, squashed in the back of the car between my mother and Maud like a sandwich filling between two slices of bread, one fresh and yielding, the other hard as a brick, I mouthed, ‘Ma gerto o ca’ with silent fervour as Alfred veered right at Horsford Point. It was, as I saw it, only this which, every time, prevented him from forking left to Horsford and Holt – and Timbuctoo, for all I knew to the contrary.

  ‘It won’t be long now,’ said my mother, ‘before you’ll have grown into Maisie’s bicycle, and then you’ll be able to ride to St Awdry’s yourself.’

  ‘With Maud on the back,’ added Alfred.

  ‘Don’t talk daft!’ said Maud, who could never take a joke against herself.

  I had been out to St Awdry’s lots of Sundays during the months that had passed since Nellie Smith had disappeared from my life. Twice – during the Christmas, and again, during the Easter holidays, I had stayed a week there – good times, but different, lacking the excitement with which the gypsy girl had infused every single day of our acquaintance.

  For that was all it had been, I was forced to acknowledge, sorrowfully. An acquaintanceship, if that. I felt I knew the gypsy princess lying buried somewhere in Norwich cemetery, trapped like a wild bird and imprisoned in a cage of earth, better than I knew her daughter. As it was, I had actually got myself another friend, sort of: Dora Chapman, a large, cheerful girl whose unfailing readiness to go everywhere I wanted to go, do everything I wanted to do, bored me to tears more often than pleased me. What drove me round the bend was her placid acceptance that, coming as I did from the city and speaking posh, I was different from the rest of the village, and superior.

  I had spent enough time at Opposite the Cross Keys to know that I was not superior, and I hated to be told I was. To compensate, I suppose, the moment I arrived at the Fenners’ I got myself into a state of scruffiness the most intractable native would have considered overdoing it. It was a happy day for me when Mrs Fenner, taking a good look at me one morning – my matted hair, my dress with the hem hanging, plimsolls with the lace missing from one and a toe poking out of its fellow – remarked, ‘Know somethin’, Sylvie. You’re getting me a bad name in the village. Know what Her Majesty (she meant the ex-kitchen-maid at Sandringham) said to me? “Don’t she ever wash?” she said. Cheek!’

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  ‘What you think I said? I said, “Not if I can bloody help it!”’

  Looking the way I did it was no surprise that Patricia Livermore, coming upon me in the Post Office, had hesitated before coming over to speak. If I’d seen her first she wouldn’t have seen me for dust. Patricia Livermore was a new girl at Eldon House, who had moved to Norfolk with her parents from Birmingham. She was plain, uninteresting, and none of us at Eldon House cared for the funny way she spoke. There was nothing about her to induce us – little horrors that we were – to open our closed circles of friendship and let her in. Her father was something at the Midland Bank in Norwich, which made me glad my father banked with the National Provincial. When I heard that the family had moved into a house with mock-Tudor beams called Old Saffrons just outside St Awdry’s on the Spixworth road, I was furious. I didn’t want my Norwich life and my Salham St Awdry life to touch at any point.

  Unfortunately, Patricia took my presence in St Awdry’s during school holidays as a heaven-sent opportunity to get herself a friend at last. I tried to put her off by letting her see the interior of Opposite the Cross Keys, but still she stuck like a burr. The Fenners aroused her horrified but titillated curiosity. ‘Sylvia, they’re so common!’ she breathed to me in wonder. She said the same about Dora Chapman. Girls who didn’t wear school uniform were common by definition. That was the kind of girl she was.

  Still, there was a limit to the number of times you could say no. When I said I couldn’t come to play tennis – there was a tennis court at Old Saffrons – pleading in excuse that my racquet was back in St Giles, she assured me there was a spare I could use, just the right weight and a Slazenger, to boot. And when I said I couldn’t come to tea on Monday, she would ask me for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday – any day I fancied, so long as I came.

  As it happened, Mrs Livermore was a very good cook, and I wouldn’t have minded going to tea at Old Saffrons so much if it hadn’t been for the fuss. I was too young, too wrapped up in my own selfish concerns, to see the pathos in her laying on of those cakes and jellies and sandwiches cut into fancy shapes, all to snare a friend for her unattractive daughter. God knows the poor woman must have felt she was scraping the bottom of the barrel to be encouraging such a ragamuffin as I.

  The Sunday I arrived with Maud for our formal introduction to the new tenant of the cottage next door, Patricia Livermore was hanging about outside the Cross Keys, waiting to ask me to tea.

  ‘I can’t possibly come.’ I dismissed the invitation with scant courtesy and secret mirth. ‘We’re having Chicken!’

  Chicken was sitting at the table with the rest of the Fenners, already so much part of the family that it seemed inconceivable he had not always been there, in his black clothes which were not at all mournful, his black cap on his head, his white teeth shining in his dark face. When we came in through the door he got up from his seat, came across and took Maud’s hand with a mock gallantry, a little bow from the waist which made us all laugh yet contained an essence of genuine courtliness which had Maud colouring to the eyebrows. To me he said, one eyelid drooping in a wink imperceptible to the others, ‘So this is the famous Sylvie! I’ll have to mind my fuckin’ p’s an’ q’s, won’t I?’

  I can’t hope to pin down the man’s raffish charm: only that we all – and not only the Fenner ménage, the whole village, with one or two exceptions – succumbed to it. He kept us all laughing: but then, round that table at Opposite the Cross Keys, we had laughed a lot before he came. Simply, I think, when we were in his company we all felt more alive, full of potentialities previously unsuspected. The fact that, on the face of it, he was as poor as, if not poorer even than the Fenners, carried no weight at all. Had he a mind for it, we did not doubt, he could conquer the world.

  Chicken was very foul-mouthed. Next to him the Fenners sounded like a Sunday School class. Yet that is to do him an injustice. ‘Foul’ betokens a predetermination, mens rea, and Chicken, I could swear, had no such evil intent. My guess is that – as with the Fenners, except that, having travelled further afield, he had garnered an expression or two out of their ken – the obscenities which peppered every other sentence were the only way he knew of breaking out of that narrow cage of language in which circumstances and lack of educational opportunity had imprisoned him.

  Before we ate tea, he took Maud and me next door to see what he had done to his new home; myself, of course, pretending that I had never before seen the place. The d
erelict cottage was in any event transformed even since my earlier sight of it; the loose plaster cleared away, the walls whitewashed. There was still no furniture, unless you could call a rolled-up mattress, a couple of crates, and an old-fashioned cobblers’ last set up by the window, furniture. Where the divider between front and back rooms had been taken away, the ceiling was no longer sagging. On either side, it was supported by what – despite some shortening since our last acquaintance – I had no difficulty whatever in recognizing as four of the telegraph poles I had sat on by the roadside.

  ‘Careful not to brush up against them bloody uprights,’ Chicken warned, contriving another wink in my direction. ‘You might get black all down yer sodding socks.’

  Maud observed innocently, ‘They look like telegraph poles.’

  ‘They do, don’t they?’ Chicken agreed, smiling widely in compliment to her sharpness of eye. Maud glowed: a different kind of glow from the glows she summoned up for an Eric or a Curly. I knew instinctively that she would never try to woo Chicken with Woodbines and slabs of chocolate, the way she had tried to woo them.

  ‘Pines, tha’s what they are,’ Chicken said. ‘Special kind, what put out cones as look like china eggcups.’ Maud said she didn’t remember seeing any like that. ‘Common as dirt,’ said Chicken. ‘On’y temp’rary this lot, though. Aim to put up marble pillars once I get me curtains up.’

  At my suggestion, my mother had sent a fruit cake as a gift to Mrs Fenner. It was, in fact – but this I kept to myself – a gift to Chicken, a celebratory cake in honour of his coming. I only wished it might have been covered in white icing, with the words WELCOME CHICKEN picked out on the top in hundreds-and-thousands.

  At tea, thinking of the cobblers’ last I had seen next door, I asked the guest of honour, ‘Are you a shoe mender?’

  ‘Me, gal?’ Chicken took a deep sup of his tea, put down the cup, and wiped the back of his hand across his natty little moustache. I had yet to discover that he almost never answered a question directly. It was, I think, not so much that he was afraid of the truth as that he did not believe in it on principle; or, if he did believe in it, it was something not to be mentioned in polite circles, something to be sidled up to, spoken out of the side of the mouth like an offering of dirty postcards. ‘Shoe mender?’ Chicken repeated with a note of interrogation in his tone, as if he were asking the question of himself. ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor – Jack of all trades, tha’s me.’

  Mrs Fenner said, ‘You oughter see the way he patched Tom’s boot. King George don’t get his boots patched better ’n that.’

  The conversation veered elsewhere: but a moment or two later Tom, who, bent over, had been struggling with something under the table, straightened up with one of his boots in his hand. Red-faced and triumphant, he planted the unlovely object, its sole caked with mud, straw and worse, square in the middle of the tea table.

  Nobody took umbrage. Mrs Fenner exclaimed, ‘Tom, you are a one!’ Maud moved the cake a safe distance away, otherwise she laughed with the rest of us. In turn we examined the patch Chicken had put on the side of the boot and agreed it was indeed a patch fit for a king. Chicken took the praise as no more than his due, Tom was radiant. Maud remarked to me across the table, ‘We’ll have to get him to have a go at your ankle straps, Sylvie.’

  At that I made a face, which I am sure Chicken noted. My mother, let me say, subscribed to what – having exchanged notes with my contemporaries – I now believe to be a commonly held fallacy of the time: to wit, that a child’s new shoes, by definition, could not – nay, should not – be comfortable; they had to be ‘grown into’. If, by chance, the pair you tried on in the shoe shop felt just right, they were, ipso facto, too long, too short, too narrow, too wide, too something, to be acceptable. If they didn’t need ‘growing into’ there had to be something wrong with them.

  In no instance were the practical results of this dire creed more evident than with one’s Sunday best or party shoes, because, being worn less often than one’s day-to-day footwear, they had less chance of ever becoming ‘grown into’. What made it worse, in my own case, was that my best shoes – my ankle straps – were invariably made of black patent leather, sweet and girlish according to my mother, but, according to me, unvarnished hell to wear.

  If anyone in the world could do anything about patent leather ankle straps, it had to be Chicken.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered Maud. ‘We must.’

  For me the sight of Tom’s boot cheek by jowl with the bread and the marge and the condensed milk tin underlined anew my marvellous luck at being persona grata at Opposite the Cross Keys. Imagine! If I had been so soft-headed as to have accepted Patricia Livermore’s invitation that morning, I should at that moment be sitting round a table draped with an embroidered cloth without a single stain to make it interesting, a cloth without a history; fussy little napkins, fussy doilies, fussy china, fussy silver teapot, sugar basin, milk jug, fussy, fussy. The thought of Tom’s boot with its mucky sole set down in the centre of Mrs Livermore’s tea table struck me as so amusing that I shared my thought with the others.

  Chicken had us all in stitches. Little finger crooked in exaggerated refinement he picked up the condensed milk tin and in a mincing voice inquired of me, ‘Can I pour you a little of this sodding condensed milk, ma’am, out of this sodding silver condensed milk tin?’

  After tea was cleared away we went for a walk, Mrs Fenner, Maud and I. It was Mrs Fenner’s idea to take the Spixworth road. I imagine my description of tea chez the Livermores had aroused in her a desire to take a look at Old Saffrons, if only from the outside.

  We hadn’t gone far along the High Street before Chicken, whom we had left out on the pavement sprawled on a kitchen chair watching Ellie with an air of mesmerized disbelief as she sat combing her hair, caught us up.

  ‘Felt lonely without you,’ he explained, launching the compliment into the air for each of us to catch individually as addressed to herself alone. We turned merrily into the Spixworth road, falling silent as we neared the Livermores’ home; quickly crossing the entrance to the drive with its wrought-iron gate, with ‘Old Saffrons’ woven into its black curlicues; and stopping only in the shelter of the hedge, having first satisfied ourselves that none of the family was out on the front lawn.

  My father’s tuition had made me snobbish about houses which aped the architectural language of former times, and I said what an awful house Old Saffrons was. Mrs Fenner, who judged by different standards, asked what was so bad about it: she wouldn’t mind finding one like it in her Christmas stocking.

  ‘It’s because it only pretends to be a Tudor house,’ I explained, ‘and it isn’t. It was only built five or six years ago.’

  ‘Oh ah?’ Mrs Fenner considered. ‘How long ago do it have to be built, then, to be real?’

  ‘Four hundred – three hundred and fifty years at least. And it would have been built with great big oak beams, and lovely old bricks that would just get mellower and mellower. In four hundred years’ time,’ I ended with contempt, ‘Old Saffrons will be a crumbling old ruin, with the roof fallen in, and the woodwork all rotted away –’

  ‘An’ a family of Fenners living in it, I’ll be bound!’ Mrs Fenner’s wonderful laugh rang out and, in the house, I saw an upstairs window open and someone, I couldn’t be sure who, look out. The hedge hid us, and after a moment the window was shut and whoever it was went away.

  For a moment I felt quite sorry for the Livermores, shut up in their fake Tudor with only themselves for company. But only for a moment. After that, with the hatefulness of childhood, I was even glad of their sadness: that nobody could ever be as happy as I.

  Mrs Fenner declared, ‘All the same, I wouldn’t say no to being asked there to tea.’

  ‘You’d hate it,’ I promised. ‘You’d find it horribly uncomfortable.’

  ‘Not half so uncomfortable as Mrs Whatsername, I reckon, having the likes of me drinking out of one of her fancy cups.’ As we fell into our stride
again, the four of us strung companionably across the width of the road: ‘Tell you what, Sylvie. You’re bound to get asked again when you’re down here Wednesday. You can ask young Whatsername if you can bring me along.’

  ‘I won’t – be asked, I mean,’ I added quickly, anxious not to be misunderstood. Mrs Fenner could not really mean what she had just said. It was a joke. Or was it? Whilst I loved life with the Fenners I was no social revolutionary. On the contrary: I wanted things to stay the way they were for ever and ever. If there were no establishment where was the fun of escaping from it, and the reassurance of knowing it was always there to go back to? Trying to disguise the relief in my voice I explained that, when Patricia had spoken to me that morning, she had mentioned that she probably wouldn’t be able to see me during my week at Opposite the Cross Keys: they were all going up to Birmingham for a few days.

  ‘She can stay there for good, for all I care!’

  Chapter Seventeen

  When, on Wednesday, transported with my luggage by Alfred, who experienced his usual respiratory difficulties whilst unloading it on to the horsehair sofa in Mrs Fenner’s living-room, I arrived in St Awdry’s, only Ellie was at home, sitting on her hair in the sunshine. Her ma, she said, speaking to me but looking at Alfred, was off berrying at Caxton’s, and had left a message for me to join her if I felt like it. Otherwise she’d see me at tea, please myself.

  ‘Berrying,’ said Alfred, when I went out to the car to say goodbye. He was taking in deep gulps of air like a diver surfacing from a considerable depth. ‘That sounds jolly.’ I could see that he thought anything jolly which would keep me out of Opposite the Cross Keys. ‘Strawberries, are they?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Yum!’

  I smiled kindly at my brother. Alfred had lovely hands with beautiful nails. They were never broken and you could see all the half-moons. He had no idea what it was like to pick strawberries hour after hour in the hot sun; had never seen the stain that settled, browning and gritty, into every pore of your hands, the crevices between your fingers and the lines on your palm where gypsies read your fortune. He knew nothing of the straw laid down on the ground beneath the berries which pierced the soft skin under your fingernails like red-hot needles, the slugs that stuck to the ripe fruit and had to be pulled off, little and black or large and grey like gobbets of phlegm, the agony of long squatting and the greater agony, at the end of the day, of sraightening up again.