Opposite the Cross Keys

by S. T. Haymon

  Patricia seemed in extraordinarily good spirits for somebody who had been so recently deprived of treasure. In stilted tones which, to my own ears, sounded like an instant giveaway, I began my prepared speech of commiseration. The girl brushed it aside, her normally dull face alight.

  ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened! You’ll never guess in a million years!’

  ‘What?’ The possibilities, for good or evil, were so momentous that breath failed me.

  ‘I found the silver tea service! In that big flowering currant at the side of the garage, you know the one I mean? They must have dropped it there by accident on their way out – or perhaps they heard someone coming, or they meant to come back for it later, I don’t know!’ The words tumbled over each other in her haste to get them out. ‘How we didn’t notice it before I can’t imagine – except the sun came out this morning and the light shone on the silver and I was out practising hitting tennis balls against the garage wall and I suddenly saw this light, as if someone had switched on a torch in the middle of the bush. You will come to tea this afternoon, won’t you, and I can show you exactly where they were – the teapot, the sugar basin, the jug, even the sugar tongs, not a scratch on them.’

  Tea at the Livermores, with the salvaged tea set in the place of honour, was more of a fuss than ever: chocolate éclairs which must have come from Marchesi’s in London Street as well as the usual home-made stuff. Mrs Livermore was so radiant that it annoyed me a little, as the unknown contriver of her joy, to have to forego the thanks and commendations which were my just due.

  With a certain spite I inquired, what about the other things? Had they been found as well?

  No, they had not, she replied; adding, on the crest of her good humour, ‘And a good thing too.’

  I can only put down her frankness to the fact that she must have been dying for somebody to crow to – and a child didn’t count, did it? You could say anything to a child and it was in one ear and out of the other.

  ‘I can only hope they won’t be,’ she went on merrily. ‘Those awful candlesticks! An aunt of Mr Livermore’s gave them to us, so we had to leave them out on display, but every time they caught my eye I’d go “Grr!” inside, thinking how awful they were.’

  All I could think to say was, ‘Mr Livermore’s aunt will be sorry.’

  ‘She’ll have to get used to it. And I shall have the insurance money!’ Seeing my look of incomprehension: ‘Surely you know about insurance? If you’re insured and something gets stolen, the insurance company pays you money to make up for it.’

  At that I perked up wonderfully. So Mrs Livermore wouldn’t, after all, be any worse off for Chicken’s crime. Indeed, from the sound of it, she would be better off. He had done her a favour. Instead of being lumbered with candlesticks she couldn’t stand the sight of, she would have money to do what she liked with. Remembering what Mr Hayes had reported about the way she had carried on about her jewellery, I asked if the insurance company would give her money to buy some more jewellery as well; and she said yes, but going rather red and immediately changing the subject to the chocolate éclairs and what marvellous pastrycooks the Marchesis were.

  I knew nothing about insurance companies and little more about human nature, but I felt instinctively that there was something fishy about Mrs Livermore and her jewellery. On the way to Old Saffrons Patricia had told me that the burglar had taken her mother’s gold watch and her engagement ring set with diamonds, and the antique chain with its pendant of amethyst and pearls which had belonged to her great-grandmother. Now, prompted by some inner devil more knowing than my conscious self, I said with that transparent innocence which is the mask of juvenile guile, ‘Even with the insurance money, you must be frightfully upset about your great-grandmother’s antique chain and pendant –’

  ‘Oh, frightfully!’ Mrs Livermore agreed, with such a caricatured concern that I was suddenly sure as sure it hadn’t been stolen at all. She was only pretending so as to get more insurance money. I had absolutely no grounds for coming to such a conclusion, except that she had made insurance money sound so much more desirable than ordinary money. Perhaps it was made out of gold, like the old sovereigns. I suppose it was my passionate desire to exonerate Chicken from blame that had conjured up the bizarre possibility: unless love had given me a sixth sense to pierce through Mrs Livermore’s pretence of respectability. I don’t know, I didn’t know: only that I wanted to shout out, ‘You’re as much a criminal as Chicken is! You’re both as bad as each other!’

  Of course I said nothing, and accepted a second eclair with Eldon House grace. When, that evening, I asked Chicken if silver candlesticks, a gold watch, an engagement ring set with diamonds, and an antique chain and pendant had been included in the haul, his eyes and mouth widened in surprise.

  ‘Candlesticks? Watch? Engagement ring? There weren’t nothing that didn’t come out of Woolworth’s!’

  But, of course, I didn’t know whether I could believe him any more than I could Mrs Livermore.

  ‘Another cup, Sylvia?’ she inquired, the silver teapot poised for action. Suddenly I saw, in all its awfulness, where the teapot had been, down that hole at the bottom of the Fenners’ garden, buried under a load of shit. All the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten that silver teapot. I opened my mouth to say ‘No, thank you,’ which was a mistake. Once open, disaster struck, copious and unavoidable.

  When the mess was cleared up, the embroidered cloth put in to soak, the carpet washed, and the french doors to the garden flung open to get rid of the smell, Mrs Livermore commented through lips arranged in a thin line, ‘You should never have eaten that second eclair, Sylvia,’ as if it were my fault.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The day before I was due back in St Giles, I went next door and saw something wonderful pinned up on the wall. I know now that it was a blueprint, but at the time I had no idea it was other than a picture, one I was not as yet equipped to understand, other then to have a sharp and instant conviction of its tremendous significance. Chicken was sitting on one of his orange boxes in rapt contemplation of this masterpiece.

  ‘What you think of that, then, gal?’ he demanded, not taking his eyes off it.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  The blueprint was full of lines, some straight, some curving. The way these lines were drawn in, with strength and at the same time the greatest delicacy, reminded me, more than anything else, of my father’s exercises in Chinese calligraphy. I no more expected to make sense of them than I did of those ideograms, put on to paper with the lovely tapered brushes which came out of the little jar patterned with butterflies.

  That being so, Chicken’s next words confused me.

  ‘What you think she’ll look like, then, on the water?’

  ‘The water?’

  The man twisted round on the box and stared at me. ‘Don’t tell me yer don’t even know what you’re gawpin’ at, up there?’ And when I shook my head to signify that, alas, I did not know: ‘Can’t you reckernize a bleedin’ boat when you see one?’

  I looked again at the blueprint on the wall, straining to extract from it what to Chicken was so obvious; and whether it was truth or the product of my passionate longing, it seemed to me, after moments of agonized contemplation, that I did indeed see: a boat, a boat with a cabin presented three ways – in profile, the hull, and the body. The longer I looked at those lines, the more real they became, their flatness acquiring dimension until I could see, not only the boat, but its upside-down reflection in the water, under a blue sky studded with small white clouds. I looked until I saw not merely the outward semblance of a boat, but its soul. In the beginning God created lines, and the lines were a boat, and he saw that it was good.

  Chicken said, ‘You’ll get yerself cross-eyed if you look much longer. What you say, then? What you say to a boat like that?’

  Foolishly, I thought that he meant to build me a model, comparable to the model yacht Alfred had given me for my last birthday and which occasio
nally, so as not to hurt his feelings – it was the most boring pursuit imaginable – I sailed on the pond in Eaton Park.

  Now I said politely, ‘That would be lovely.’

  ‘That all you got to say?’ He tugged at his cap, brought his black eyebrows together, mock-ferocious. ‘Maybe I ought ter ferget the whole fuckin’ idea.’

  I explained that I didn’t want to take up his valuable time, that was all, as I already possessed a model boat.

  ‘Who said anything about a model?’

  That was the beginning of Chicken’s boat, a boat that was the best part of two years a-building, and, during that time, the corner-stone of my life, filling my mind with dreams and hopes I scarcely dared formulate. A refuge. In passages of boredom, disappointment, melancholia, think about Chicken’s boat and escape into another world.

  By the time of my next visit to Salham St Awdry the downstairs room of his cottage had been transformed. Blackboards chalked with enlarged portions of the blueprint on the wall had been laid over part of the old floor tiles, to be stepped on at your peril. Tools of unfamiliar configuration were laid out ready for use on the workbench which had replaced the shelf and the cobblers’ last by the window.

  My ankle straps, which Maud, good as her word, had handed over for treatment, had been Chicken’s final task in his incarnation as shoe repairer.

  ‘There!’ producing them from a dark corner and thrusting them into my arms as if glad to be rid of shoes once and for all. ‘I fixed ’em for you.’

  He had indeed fixed them. The next time I wore the ankle straps was to a party where, as was the custom, I changed into dancing pumps for the duration of the festivities. For once, changing back into my outdoor shoes for the walk home was no purgatory. Chicken was a genius. The ankle straps, though to outward appearance unchanged, were now blissfully comfortable.

  Three-quarters of the way home they fell to pieces. The uppers lifted off the soles, the seams down the backs of the heels parted like dehiscing seedpods. That, heaven be praised, was the end of ankle straps in my life. My mother – by unspoken agreement between Maud and myself kept in ignorance of Chicken’s ministrations – was so bemused by the sight of this utter disintegration that she never bought me a pair again.

  When I reported to Chicken what had happened, he winked and pulled down the points of his waistcoat.

  ‘Said I’d fix ’em for you, didn’t I?’

  I was never actually in St Awdry’s when the raw materials for Chicken’s boat arrived, so that I knew nothing of who delivered the piles of timber which presently stood about the back garden, resting on sawn-off railway sleepers and covered with tarpaulins; the blocks, the trestles, the sawhorse; the oil drum, rubber hose and plywood shuttering which Chicken, with what seemed to me incomparable ingenuity, converted into an apparatus for steaming wood until it could be bent without splintering. I gathered from Mrs Fenner that the deliveries were frequently made at unsocial hours, which could have meant something or nothing. All that Mrs Fenner contributed was that them bloody Leaches next door were forever sounding off about their lettuces getting trampled underfoot in the dark.

  ‘That pore ole bor –’ Mrs Fenner meant Chicken – ‘he can’t so much as knock in a tintack afore they’re hammering on the wall like lunatics. They were glad enough when he moved in and sent them rats packing. They live in the middle o’ the desert, they’d be screaming blue murder every time one o’ them A-rabs spit out a date stone!’

  Surveying the land at the back of Opposite the Cross Keys, which had taken on the look of a mini-Jewson’s (the timber merchants down by the Wensum in Norwich), I could understand that, for the Leaches, Chicken’s spell must be wearing a bit thin. PC Utting, it went without saying, regarded the accumulation with deepest suspicion.

  Until, that is, the day he dropped in on Chicken for a spot of pointed questioning; saw the blueprint and the chalked full-size plans I was beginning to refer to knowledgeably as the loftings; heard what Chicken had to say; and went away thoughtful and uplifted.

  ‘What you tell the ole bugger, then?’ Mrs Fenner wanted to know at tea that evening. ‘He went away like he jest seen Christ walkin’ on the water.’

  ‘On’y that I were building a boat.’

  ‘He could ’a told you that. Everyone in the village know that.’

  Chicken tipped his chair back on two legs until it rested against the chest of drawers. He thrust his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat.

  ‘He didn’t know what kind o’ boat, though.’

  ‘What diff’rence that make?’

  ‘All the diff’rence in the world.’ Contemplating his audience round the table with an innocence which set us all agog to hear what lovely mischief he was up to now, he added off-handedly, ‘Told him I were building another ark, tha’s all.’

  ‘You never!’

  ‘You know wha’ the bugger’s like. Sin and fornication everywhere, an’ the on’y reason God lets us get away with it He’s waiting for a fresh delivery of coals to get the fires of hell stoked up real good.

  When they’re hot enough to burn yer balls He’ll be sending a flood what’ll make the las’ one look like a gob o’ spit.’

  Mr Fenner, in his rocking chair by the fire, took his pipe out of his mouth and emerged from his private fog.

  ‘Don’t say nothing about another flood in Old Moore.’

  ‘Course it don’t!’ said Mrs Fenner. ‘Chicken were havin’ the geezer on. Weren’t you, Chicken – havin’ him on?’

  Taking heed of the anxiety, imperfectly concealed, the man laughed, stroked his natty little moustache.

  ‘No need fer you to worry, missus! We got a flood coming, no one gets a seat in my boat ahead o’ you. Tha’s a promise!’ Expanding his regard to include the rest of us at table: ‘An’ that goes for the lot o’ you, even young Sylvie!’

  I burst out laughing and said, ‘I bet you promised PC Utting a seat too, so long as he didn’t ask too many questions.’

  ‘You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself! Wanted to know where I got my timber, how much I paid, had I got receipts – I ask you!’

  ‘Did you have any to show him?’

  ‘Did the Lord God, I arst him, ask fer a receipt for the quails an’ the manna He rained down on the fuckin’ Israelites? Took him back a bit, I can tell you, me quotin’ Scripture. Then he wanted t’ know how I were goin’ to get the boat down to a river. “What river?” I arst. “I’m not goin’ out lookin’ for a flood, any more’n Noah did. I aim to wait an’ let it bloody well come t’ me.”’

  In retrospect, the most extraordinary thing about Chicken’s boat, with the exception of its actual building, was the way the village took it in its stride. Nobody questioned the undertaking, nor commented on the oddity of choosing to construct a sizeable vessel indoors. There may have been speculation in the Swan or the Cross Keys, I was in no position to say, but I never heard anyone wondering aloud how, when it was finished, it was to be got through that narrow door.

  Perhaps, for PC Utting was not the only fundamentalist Christian in the neighbourhood, the story of the coming flood had taken root and conviction, and the ark was expected to be borne forth on the bosom of the waters as the windows of heaven opened and Opposite the Cross Keys gave way under the strain. Perhaps – since the work progressed very slowly, as was inevitable single-handed – people thought it would never be finished, did not even want it to be finished. It was enough that its presence enlarged their lives, broadened their horizons. Further east in the county, in Broadland, that ambiguous area of rivers and lakes and marsh, which was like the world as it might have been at the beginning of Creation, land, sky and water not yet quite separated, a boat was nothing special. In St Awdry’s it was, like the rainbow it presaged, a promise of possibilities.

  Back in St Giles Maud and I discussed the boat endlessly. I had never said anything about Chicken to my parents, not because I was ashamed of him – Mrs Fenner had taught me that lesson – but because I knew, disadva
ntaged as they were, lacking a Maud or a family of Fenners in their own childhoods, they could never be expected to understand about the name, and would only be affronted, if not terrified, by the laughing lawlessness I found so powerful an attraction.

  My father, a man of honour and innocence, tended to think of all countrymen as nature’s gentlemen, practising their rural crafts in landscapes of the Norwich School. He knew nothing of the dirt, the smell of poverty, the grinding labour which made up the life of the agricultural labourer of the time – or, if he knew something, it was only something he had read, deodorized on the printed page, paying as much attention to its literary merit as to the facts presented there. Nevertheless, so full was I of the boat and its building that I could not resist mentioning something about it – ‘a man in St Awdry’s was making one, all by himself’ – knowing he would be pleased to hear that rural crafts were flourishing in the outback exactly as he had supposed.

  ‘A boat, eh? I must see what I can do in that line.’

  My father, let me say, among his other accomplishments, was a whiz at cutting out. He could take a pack of playing cards and, using only scissors and a dab of glue, turn it into enchanting three-dimensional models of merry-go-rounds, castles complete with jousting knights, troikas pulled by slavering horses – whatever you asked for would be provided, so long as the cards, which my mother, who was fond of playing whist in the afternoon with selected ladies, secreted in various nooks about the house, could be unearthed over her protests and put to better use than foolish games.

  Out of a blue pack and a red pack patterned with tiny fleurs-de-lis, my father fashioned a galley twelve inches long, which looked like something out of an illuminated manuscript with its castles at either end, its pennons caught in frozen flutter, and its great sail – the only part showing the face of a card – emblazoned with the ace of hearts. A tiny figure in the crow’s nest had its hand to its eyes, scanning the horizon.