Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Ah, once we get the beds put up, and the water brushed out of the downstairs rooms, it’ll be more like home than home, you’ll see. At least the electric’s on for us,’ Ma said brightly to Ottilie after they’d managed to boil the kettle for some tea. ‘All this place is in need of is a bit of a lick of paint, Ottie darlin’, and some love. That’s all this place needs, pet. Really. We’ll have it like new in no time.’ And she gave Ottilie a quick hug, as if she sensed the little girl needed reassuring.

  It was the pitch-black darkness of it all. The deep, deep black of the night, no comforting street lighting, no feeling that outside there were human beings to whom you could run, recognizable people who walked or hurried towards shops and away from buses, or away from buses towards shops. Here on Ottilie’s first night in this place called ‘the country’ there was nothing but black.

  Ottilie closed her eyes, terrified of the density of the darkness, only to find that it was black behind her eyes too and that shutting them against the dark did not send the fear away. All she wanted was to go back to Number Four where happiness was street lighting outside the window all night, and the gentle hum of the evening traffic soothing her to sleep only to wake her once more in the morning. She put her head under her pillow. She thought she was going to hate this place called Cornwall.

  But in the morning everything was better. Ma laid out the old kitchen table in front of the cottage door, and although the grass was long and tufty in places Lorcan put stones under the legs and banged it down, and after a while it stopped wobbling. Then they all sat outside while Ma buttered bread and poured the milk she’d brought all the way from London into a blue and white striped jug, and set out a great slab of yellow butter, and what with the old brown teapot and their old nursery mugs to drink from, and being able to watch the birds come and feed when Lorcan threw the crumbs from their plates towards them, Cornwall suddenly seemed a great deal better to Ottilie than it had the night before.

  ‘With a little help from God and the weather, we surely must be able to mend the roof and the plumbing before winter?’ Ma asked of no-one, as the two younger boys started to climb trees and Ottilie wandered over to the little stream that ran between the cottage and the road. ‘I should say so,’ she finished, half to herself, as she walked to where Ottilie was trying to see past the weeds down to the stones where she thought there might be fish. ‘Mind yourself now, pet. Just until you can swim.’

  Ottilie turned to make sure Ma was watching, and then carefully removed her socks and shoes and stepped down the shallow bank into the stream. She wrinkled her face at the aching cold of the water and the feel of the sharp stones, but she did not attempt to climb out, so suddenly soothing was the sensation of real water in a real stream. With the sounds of the birds around, the smell of the fresh grass and the murmur of a bee busy somewhere near, she felt thoroughly happy.

  She smiled back at Ma.

  ‘You’re bold, you are,’ Ma murmured and left her to refill her enamelled mug with tea while Ottilie stared fascinated at the wildlife that was swimming past her feet and ankles. She saw a toad further up the bank, and a butterfly. Eventually, with Ma still gone, she stared up into the air around her, at the blue sky, the clouds, the birds, the sun which was already starting to warm her, and as she did so the picture that she saw above her, her picture, was suddenly filled with a red face, narrow eyes, bearded chin and a cap set on top of thick white ill-cut tufted hair.

  ‘What you doin’ here? That waater, that’s not for ’ee to paddle in, not’t all. That waater goes t’ troughs at top, ’s not for ’ee t’ put dirty feet in!’

  Ottilie stared up at the angry face above her, and then turning quickly attempted to scramble up the steep sides of the bank down which she had slipped a few minutes earlier with such success. But now her bare, shoeless feet were so wet they slid uselessly, just as her hands proved useless when she tried to pull at the tufts of grass that grew what seemed yards above her on the steep sides of the stream. The man started to lean towards her, his own feet slip-sliding down the sides of the bank. Ottilie opened her mouth to call to someone but no sound came out. She wanted to shout for Lorcan and Ma, and Joseph, and Sean – for everyone, for them all, but she couldn’t, even though she had opened her mouth wider and wider as he reached out and grabbed her, and anyway the sight of this large man slip-sliding down towards her froze her with fear. Finally a scream did emerge, but it was not hers. Ma was plunging down the bank towards the man.

  ‘You leave her alone,’ Ma screamed, just as it seemed that the man’s large red hands had reached out to drag Ottilie towards him.

  ‘She be paddlin’ in our waater – tedden right. Paddlin’s for sea, not for our waater. That waater serves all o’ us in these cribs.’

  But the old man’s angry words of justification were wasted on Ma. All she could see was the stranger’s hands on Ottilie’s shoulders, pulling her towards him. Without a moment’s hesitation she hurtled forward, and reaching up she punched him as hard as she could. He stepped back, his eyes registering astonishment at the woman’s primitive fury, but as he did so his old wellington boots slipped suddenly out from under him on the watery base of the stream, and he staggered backwards before falling with a sudden, frightening force.

  Ottilie watched with fascination from behind Ma as he just lay there while Ma looked down in amazement at his extraordinary and very prompt state of unconsciousness, as visibly astonished as he had been when she had punched him in the shoulder with such force.

  Ottilie, realizing that she was the cause of all the trouble, promptly stuck her thumb in her mouth as Ma let out another great scream, this time for someone to come and help her drag the old man up the bank before he ‘drowned in the water, God help him’.

  ‘I think you’ve killed him, Ma,’ Lorcan announced when he joined his mother in the stream, watched closely by Mrs Burgess and the other two boys from the bank above them. ‘Hey. Someone help me, will ya?’

  Between them all they dragged the old man as best they could from the stream and up the bank, until they finally placed him on the grass. Mrs Burgess ran inside for a jug of cold water from the kitchen to throw over him.

  ‘It’s ice cold, anyway,’ she cried, running back out again. ‘It hurts to put your hand in it.’

  The water must indeed have been cold, because within seconds the old man was starting to sit up, and then cursing and swearing and holding the back of his head, not to mention his sodden cap, while Lorcan and Joseph and Mrs Burgess fussed over him and apologized what seemed to Ottilie to be a hundred times for the accident.

  Thoroughly conscious now but still furious, he backed away from them, wanting nothing of their brushings down and offers of cups of tea.

  ‘I shaan’t forget whaat ’ee done,’ he shouted, and still cursing and holding his head he staggered off down the road, his clothes leaving a wet trail on the hard uneven surface.

  ‘Ah, Ma, what did you want to go and do that for?’ Lorcan groaned, and he shook his head disbelievingly at his mother as the rest of them watched the angry old figure disappearing into the distance, the sound of his footsteps still reverberating in the quiet air long after he had become a far and distant figure. ‘I mean, what in heaven’s name possessed you? You’ve made an enemy before we’ve even hung up our trousers on the bed rail.’

  ‘Sure ’twasn’t my fault the silly old man fell over, Lorcan, and never say I’ve made an enemy,’ Ma said without much conviction, still looking after the damp figure staggering down the hill. ‘Any man touches my children I give them what’s coming to them, Lorcan, you know that. Didn’t he have his hands on Ottilie’s little shoulders? One second later and she could have been taken from us and we would never have seen her again. I’ve known that to happen before. Tinkers and gypsies and old men of no fixed abode, they steal children to help them with their own stealing. And didn’t my own father used to say that you have to swat them like flies as soon as they land near you?’

  Lorcan
sighed and shook his head. ‘We’re not in Ireland now, Ma, we’re not even at Number Four. That man is not a tinker or a gypsy, he’s probably some local character. And he’s not likely to take this lying down, I tell you. The postman warned us, people round these parts are very clannish, St Elcombe particularly. The postman said we’re foreigners here, as much as if we’d come from abroad, and that’s the truth, Ma. That’s why we’ve got to be careful, because of being foreigners in St Elcombe.’

  As Lorcan spoke the whole family listened, silent and suddenly worried. Lorcan was after all the eldest. Lorcan was the most sensible too. He was in Da’s place, and they all knew it. Ma looked across at him, shamefaced, knowing that he was speaking the truth. She never liked upsetting Lorcan, the quiet one, the good one. Lorcan was a shoulder to lean on, a man already in his mother’s eyes.

  ‘You must be careful, Ma. We don’t know anyone here and there’s no-one likely to be on our side,’ he reminded his mother more gently, before starting back towards Charlie and the hearse to resume the unpacking. As he went he tried to shrug his shoulders, but his face still reflected his worried state of mind.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lorcan, really. My temper just got the better of me,’ Ma called after him.

  ‘Ah, you did what you did, and what you did you did for the best reasons, Ma, and nothing at all to be done now. Let’s just hope that the man is not some sort of great huge power in the village, because then our goose will be well and truly cooked. And eaten for that matter.’

  ‘If he’s a power anywhere except in his own mind, I personally would be flabberstruck. I mean, an old man like that, he’s no more than just a local nobody, surely?’ Ma looked round for reassurance.

  But as they were all soon to discover, there was no such thing as a nobody in St Elcombe.

  Three

  A magical discovery was made by Ottilie over the next weeks. Ladybirds would sometimes land on her outstretched arms if she stood still enough, and they could be put into a jam jar with a lid which her second brother Joseph had pierced with his treasured penknife. The insects made fascinating viewing as they climbed about the grass inside the jar before being released when evening came. And this was only one of many entertainments, for there were spiders’ webs to be watched and nests to be made from straw and grass for ungrateful wild birds who never seemed to be tempted to use them. These delights soon became more than adequate compensation for the darkly frightening nights that Cornwall had brought to Ottilie’s life.

  Just lying in the grass and listening to what seemed to her fanciful imagination to be armies of ants in hobnailed boots marching towards her was happiness itself. And the sky above her that first summer, it was always, always blue, so blue that because it was reflected in the sea Ottilie came to think that blue was the sea’s natural colour and it would always stay like that, little realizing that when the sky turned grey, so too would the sea.

  There was so much to do at the cottage it was just as well that the early summer weather continued hot and cloudless. Even Mrs Burgess was reluctant to go back to London, although she finally did.

  She had hardly departed before Lorcan and Joseph, with the aid of books borrowed from the St Elcombe library, started on the rebuilding of the cottage, Sean acting as an unwilling builder’s mate. And so it was that a new routine established itself, a routine that seemed to make Ma look younger and happier with each day that passed, and as the days turned to weeks it seemed that the move from Number Four could only be deemed a success.

  For Ottilie there were still more unlooked-for joys in keeping watch for field mice, in seeing her feet and legs, day by happy day, turning a richer and deeper brown – a colour which at evening she noticed was gloriously emphasized by the white marks made by her bathing suit – in the seemingly endless golden afternoons during which, while the boys worked on the cottage, Ma would take her down to the sea to paddle. It was not so far to the shore that they could not walk the whole way, Ma strolling in the sunshine, her hips swaying comfortably, Ottilie beside her carrying her newest most precious possessions which were a tin bucket and a small plastic spade that Ma had bought for her at the shop near the beach.

  Most days Ma and she took their tea in a basket so that Ottilie’s skill in building some new and even more elaborate sandcastle was rewarded by sitting back and biting into mildly gritty tea time sandwiches and sponge cakes whose icing ran a little from being in the sun. Then Ottilie watched with satisfying contentment the incoming tide slowly flood first her castle’s moat, then its inner courtyards, before eventually drowning the whole edifice, a signal for her and Ma to turn for home, the cottage and the boys.

  ‘It’s too hot for sandwiches. We’ll go up to the shop and buy you a cornet.’ Ma pulled Ottilie to her one afternoon and retied her sun bonnet before kissing her and coaxing her feet into her beach shoes with their long shoelaces that tied round and round her ankles. ‘Come, pet, take Ma’s finger, and we’ll go on up. We may not be millionaires, darlin’, but we can afford to buy you a cornet today, and maybe take a block in some newspaper back to the boys, for they’ve been slaving on the cottage so they have and they deserve a little treat.’

  Ottilie did not notice the silence in the shop when Ma and she walked in that afternoon, but she did notice the bright shiny beach balls hung in nets above her, blown up ready to be played with on the beach. She gazed at them mesmerized as Ma went to the counter and asked for a cornet. The ice cream had to be scooped out with a special spoon from a big container. Ottilie longed for a beach ball, but knew, without being told, there was no money for such a thing.

  ‘Shall we’m put ice creaam block in newspaper for ’ee, ma’am?’

  ‘That’s kind of you, I’d say.’

  The woman took down a cardboard box for carrying their purchases as Ma carefully counted out the money from her old red leather purse, exactly the right amount for the ice creams in pennies and halfpennies. Ottilie remembered that, because Ma had such a thing about change. Once the boys had found a shiny new shilling on the road. They wanted to keep it, but Ma would not let them, although she stared at it with reverence as if imagining just how nice that little shilling turned into a fresh-baked loaf might taste. But no, they had to leave it on the wall beside the road, in case the person who owned it came back looking for it and was in greater need than they. The boys had found that hard, a whole shilling was after all a whole shilling, and they would have dearly loved to buy some sweets with that money, but what Ma said went, so the shilling stayed.

  That was why Ottilie remembered how carefully Ma had counted out the money, because of the business of the shilling those many months before.

  This afternoon there were no such lucky finds, just Ma taking the wrapped ice cream that the lady behind the counter handed to her all tucked up neatly in an old grocery box, and then they were outside the shop, and Ma had just leaned down to wipe Ottilie’s mouth with the corner of her small flowered handkerchief, saying in a low voice, ‘One day that woman will think to smile at me while I’m spending my hard-earned in there.’

  She had hardly finished speaking when the woman who had sold her the ice cream and the extra wafers for the boys came out of the shop, closely followed by her daughter and one of the other customers.

  ‘’Ere, you cum ’ere, madam, you cum ’ere ’twonce. We’m mun ask to see what’s en your box, please?’

  Ma straightened up and looked in bewilderment first at the cardboard box in her arms and then at the women.

  ‘Sure there’s not a thing in my box except what the lady gave me. Why would there be?’

  They stood round her and Ottilie, very close so that Ottilie could smell a faint scent of onions on them, while Ma as if in a trance handed back the still closed cardboard box into which the woman had put the ice cream wrapped in newspaper and the extra wafers for the boys.

  ‘Whaat be this then, my dear?’

  The shop owner, a small woman in a flowered apron, stared accusingly from Ma to the small cardboa
rd box as she lifted out not just the newspaper parcel but a small packet of biscuits and a packet of tea.

  ‘You ben stealin’ my goods again you ben, and we’m all seen ’ee this time. Seen ’ee with our own eyes we’m did! And ’tes not the first tem, ’tes not, we’m noticed you afore!’

  As soon as she saw those items, items that she would never buy, Ma knew they must have been deliberately put there by the shop owner.

  ‘Those have been put in there by mistake,’ she said in a voice that Ottilie recognized was strangely constricted and yet determinedly calm. ‘We – we don’t drink that kind of tea, and I always bake our own biscuits of a Sunday, so I do.’

  ‘’Tes stealin’ all th’ same, my dear, whether ’tes your kind o’ tea or not. If’s not ben paid for, ’tes thievin’.’

  ‘I tell yous I would not steal from yous, madam, not if I was starvin’ and my childer too, but if you want payin’ for these t’ings I’ll pay, and there’ll be an end to the whole unfortunate matter.’

  ‘We’m poor folk round ’ere, but we’m honest folk, not like ’ee,’ one of the other witnesses said, adding, ‘You been stealin’ from ’ere regular, we’m thinking.’

  ‘I haven’t been into the shop more than a dozen times all the time we’ve been at St Elcombe, and we’ve brought our own tea with us to the beach most days we’ve come,’ Ma said, her voice now starting to tremble. ‘As God is my witness, I’d no more steal from anyone than cut the throat of one of my own childer.’

  ‘You’m Irish. Irish’s always thievin’, ’tes what we’m heard, an’ ’tes true. We’m heard you’m like Irish lempet-pickers from the old time, they wus allus stealin’.’

  ‘We’m goin’ to take ’ee down to station and we’m goin’ to tell constable, we’m going to tell police.’

  Ottilie did not know quite what was going on but she knew about policemen all right, from living at Number Four. No-one who lived at the flats liked policemen, and no-one ever called one or took anyone else down to a station, so that long before Ma said, her voice still trembling, ‘Don’t be frightened, Ottilie pet, just hold on to Ma’s finger and we’ll soon sort all this out,’ she knew that something terrible must be happening, more awful even than when Ma had pushed the man over when Ottilie was playing in the stream.