Brand X

by Christianna Brand

  She had no close friends these days, but at last, one night, a little in her cups, she whispered it to Nellie down at the Dog. ‘You’ll never guess who I got at my place!’

  Nellie knocked back her fifth brown ale and volunteered a bawdy suggestion. ‘A boy and a girl,’ said Mrs. Vaughan, ignoring it. ‘And a Baby.’ And she thought of Him lying there in His wooden bed. ‘His little head,’ she said. ‘Behind His little head, you can see, like—a light. Shining in the darkness—a kind of a ring of light.’

  ‘You’ll see a ring of light round me,’ said Nellie, robustly, ‘if you put back another of them barley wines.’ And to the landlord she confided, when Mrs. Vaughan, a little bit tottery, had gone off home, ‘I believe she’s going off her rocker, honestly I do.’

  ‘She looked all right to me,’ said the landlord, who did not care for his regulars going off their rockers.

  ‘They’re after her stocking,’ said Nellie to the pub at large. ‘You’ll see. Them and their Baby Jesus. They’re after what she’s got.’

  And she set a little trap. ‘Hey, Billy, you work on the same site as this Jo of hers. Give him a knock some day about the old girl’s money. Got it in a stocking, saving it up for her funeral. Worried, she is, about being put in the common grave. Well, who isn’t? But she, she’s proper scared of it.’

  So Billy strolled up to Jo on the site, next break-time. ‘I hear you’re holed up with old Mother Vaughan, down near the Dog. After her stocking then, are you?’ And he pretended knowledge of its place of concealment. ‘Fill it up with something; she’ll never twig till after you’ve gone. Split me a third to two-thirds if I tell you where it’s hid?’

  And he looked up for the first time into Jo’s face and saw the look that Jo gave him: a look almost—terrible. ‘He come straight home,’ Mrs. Vaughan told Nellie in the pub that night, ‘and—“They’re saying you got money, Mrs. V.,” he says. “If you have, you should stash it away somewhere,” he says, “and let everyone know you’ve done it. Living here on your tod, it isn’t safe for you, people thinking you’re worth robbing.”’ And he had explained to her how to pay it into the post office so that no one but herself could ever touch it. Only a few quid it was, scrimped and saved for her funeral. ‘I couldn’t a-bear to go into the common grave, not with all them strangers…’

  ‘Never mind the common grave, it’ll be the common bin for you, if you don’t watch out,’ said Nellie. ‘You and your Mary and Joseph—they come in a car, didn’t they, not on a donkey?’

  ‘You haven’t got eyes to see. You don’t live with them.’

  ‘They’ve lived other places before you. Did them other landladies have eyes to see?’

  What was the name—Mrs. Mace? Had Mrs. Mace had eyes to see, had she recognised, even before the baby came—? ‘Course not,’ said Nellie, crossly. ‘She chucked ’em out, didn’t she?’

  ‘No, she never. She was moving out herself to the country, her son or someone needed the flat.’ But if one could have seen Mrs. Mace, consulted with her…‘Don’t you ever visit your last landlady?’ she asked them casually. ‘Does she live too far?’

  ‘No, not far; but with the baby and all… All the same, Marilyn,’ said Jo, ‘we ought to go some day soon, just to see she’s all right. Take you along,’ he suggested to Mrs. Vaughan. ‘You’d enjoy the drive and it’s a lovely place, all flowers and trees and a little stream.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t half like that. I dare say,’ said Mrs. Vaughan, craftily, ‘she thought a lot of you, that Mrs. Mace?’

  ‘She was very kind to us,’ said Marilyn. ‘Very kind.’

  ‘And the baby? She wasn’t, like—shocked?’

  ‘Shocked? She was thrilled,’ said Jo. And he used an odd expression: ‘Quietly thrilled.’

  So she had known. Mrs. Mace had known. The desire grew strong within Mrs. Vaughan’s anxious breast to see Mrs. Mace, to discuss, to question, to talk it all over. With familiarity, with the lessening of the first impact of her own incredulous wonder, it became more difficult to understand that others should not share her faith. ‘I tell you, I see the light shining behind His head!’ She confided it to strangers on buses, to casual acquaintances on their way to the little local shops. They pretended interest and hastily detached themselves. ‘Poor thing—another of them loonies,’ they said with the mirthless sniggers of those who find themselves outside normal experience, beyond their depths. She was becoming notorious, a figure of fun.

  The news reached the ears of the landlord, a local man. He came round to the house and afterwards spoke to the boy. ‘I’ve told her—you can’t all go on living in that one little room, it’s not decent.’

  ‘There’s the shed,’ said Jo. ‘I sleep out in the shed.’

  ‘You won’t like that for long,’ said the man with a leer.

  Billy had seen that look, on the building site. But the boy only said quietly: ‘You couldn’t let us have another room? She says they’re only used for storage.’

  ‘They’re let—storage or not, no business of mine. For that matter,’ said the man, growing cunning, ‘it’s no business of mine how you live or what you do. Only… Well, three and a kid for the price of one—’

  ‘I’ll pay extra if that’s it,’ said Jo. ‘I could manage that. It’s only that I can’t find anywhere else, not at the price I could afford.’

  ‘Just between the two of us, then. Though how you put up with it,’ he said, as the boy sorted through his pocket-book, ‘I don’t know. The old girl’s round the bend. What’s this about your kid got a light around its head?—and your girl’s a—’ But the look came once more. A strange look almost—frightening. ‘Well, like that other lot, Jesus and all. She’s mad.’

  ‘She has some ideas,’ said the boy. ‘That doesn’t make her mad.’

  But not everyone agreed with him. The greengrocer’s wife tackled Marilyn one day when she went out for the shopping, Mrs. Vaughan left worshipping the baby at home. ‘They’re all saying she’s going off her rocker. You shouldn’t be there, what with the baby and all. It could be dangerous.’

  So still and beautiful, the quiet face framed in its veil of long, straight hair. ‘Mrs. Vaughan—dangerous? She’s kind. She’d do us no harm, she loves us.’

  ‘She told us last time that the baby lies with its arms stretched out like a—well, like a cross. She said it knows how it’s going to die. Well, I mean! It’s blasphemous.’

  ‘He does lie with his arms stretched out.’

  ‘Any baby does, sometimes. And she says he shines. She says there’s always a light around his head.’

  ‘I put the lamp on the floor once to keep the brightness out of his eyes. It did sort of gleam through a crack in the wood. We explained it to her.’

  ‘Well, she never listened then. And I say it’s not right. Everyone’s talking. They say…’ It took a little courage to insist, in face of that quiet calm. ‘They’re saying you ought to fetch a doctor to her.’

  Mrs. Vaughan rebelled, predictably, against any suggestion of seeing a doctor. ‘What for? I’m not ill. Never better.’ But it alarmed her. ‘You don’t think there’s something wrong with me?’

  ‘We just thought you looked a bit pale, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m not pale, I’m fine, never been better in my life. Even them arthritics nearly gone, hardly any pain these days at all.’ And she knew why. Alone with Him, she had taken the little hand and with it touched her swollen knees, had moved it, soft and firm, across her own gnarled fingers. ‘Look at ’em!’ she had insisted to Nellie next evening, in the pub. ‘Half the size! All them swollen joints gone down.’

  ‘They look the same to me,’ said Nellie and suddenly saw Mrs. Hoskins through in the Private and had to hurry off and join her. ‘Barmy!’ she said to Mrs. Hoskins. ‘I don’t feel safe with her. How do I know she won’t suddenly do her nut and start bashing me? It should be put a stop to.’

  Only one thing seemed to threaten Mrs. Vaughan with any suggestion of doing her nut and t
hat was mention of her precious little family going away. If Jo searched for rooms now, he kept very quiet about it. To outside representations that she ought to let them go, that young people should be together in a place of their own, she replied that it wasn’t ‘like that’ between them; that Marilyn was ‘different’. All the same, they were young and shouldn’t always be cooped up with an old woman, and she fought to be allowed to move out to the shed and let them have her room; there was the bed out there now and in this weather it was warm and dry—she’d like it. In other days, she would have gone off to the pub in the evenings and left them free, but the Dog wasn’t what it had been, people didn’t seem so friendly, they looked at her funny and sometimes, she suspected, made mock behind her back of her claim to be housing God. Not that that worried her too much. In them old days—no one had believed in Him then, either. And I’ll prove it to them, she thought, and she would watch the children playing in the street and when she saw a tumble, bring in the poor victim with its bruises and scratches and cajole it into letting the baby touch the sore places with its little hand. ‘Now you feel better, love, don’t you?’ she would anxiously say. ‘Now it’s stopped bleeding, hasn’t it?—when the Baby touched you, it was all better in a minute? Now you tell me—wasn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ the children would declare, wriggling in her grasp, intent only upon getting away. ‘It’s dangerous,’ said their mothers, gathering outside the shops in anxious gossip. ‘You don’t know what she might do, luring them inside like that,’ and a deputation at last sought out Jo. ‘You ought to clear out, you two, and leave her alone. You’re driving her up the wall with these ideas.’

  ‘That’s just what we can’t do now,’ said Jo. ‘She gets upset if we even mention it.’

  ‘It could be the last straw,’ admitted Mrs. Hoskins, who knew all about it from Nellie at the Dog. ‘Properly finish her off.’

  ‘And then she’d be there without us to look after her.’

  ‘You can’t spend your whole lives in that one room.’

  ‘If we could get a place and take her with us… But we can’t find anywhere, not that we could possibly afford; let alone where she could come too.’

  ‘What?—you two kids, saddle yourselves for ever with a mad old woman? You couldn’t do that.’

  ‘She saddled herself with us,’ said Jo. ‘Where’d we be now, but for her?’

  All the same, clearly something must be done. With every day of her life with them, Mrs. Vaughan’s obsession increased. She could not bear the baby out of her sight, would walk with Marilyn when she carried it out for a breath of air and almost threateningly warn off the curious who tried for a glimpse of the now quite famous child. If they came to worship, well and good. If not…‘If you don’t make some arrangements about her,’ said the greengrocer’s wife at last, to Jo. ‘I will. She’s terrorising the whole neighbourhood.’

  ‘She wouldn’t hurt a fly. She believes our baby’s—something special. What harm does that do anyone else?’

  ‘You never know,’ said the greengrocer, supporting the missis, though in fact he was fond of Mrs. Vaughan—as indeed everyone had been in easier days. ‘They do turn queer, sometimes. Why not just take her to the doctor and ask him, or take her to the hospital?’

  ‘She won’t go to any hospital, she won’t go to any doctor.’

  ‘They can be forced,’ said the wife. ‘Strait jackets and that. They come and fetch them in a padded van.’ But anyway, she repeated, if something were not done and soon, she herself would ring up the police and let them deal with it. ‘She’s keeping custom from the shop. It can’t go on.’

  He promised hastily and later convened a little meeting of the malcontents. ‘Well, I’ve done what you said. I went to the hospital and they sent me to some special doctor and I told him all about it. They’re going to send her to a place where she won’t be too suspicious and they’ll have her under observation there, that’s what they call it, and then there’ll be psychiatrists and that, and she can have treatment. He says it’s probably only a temporary thing, she can be cured all right.’

  ‘Well, there you are! You and Marilyn can be finding somewhere else in the meantime and when she gets back and you’re not there, she’ll just settle down again.’

  ‘We’ll go anyway even if we don’t find anywhere. We couldn’t let it start all over again.’

  ‘These things aren’t as quick as all that. You’ll have time to look around.’

  ‘It’s not very nice,’ he said, ‘us there in her room and her in the bin.’

  ‘If you ever get her there. How’ll you persuade her to go?’

  ‘I’ve thought of that,’ he said. ‘Our last landlady—’

  ‘Oh, yes, that Mrs. Mace she’s always talking about. Mrs. Mace would understand, she keeps saying, Mrs. Mace knew all about it… You tell her she’s going to see Mrs. Mace.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Mrs. Mace is out in the country now and so’s this place, fifteen, twenty miles. I can drive her there in the car. She’ll go if she thinks Mrs. Mace is there. I think it’ll work.’

  And it worked. Mrs. Vaughan was prepared to leave even the precious Baby for a while, if she could go and talk to Mrs. Mace. So many puzzling things that Mrs. Mace might be able to help her with. That about the Second Coming, for example, and then no Kings had arrived, not even a shepherd carrying a woolly lamb; and what about Herod killing off all them boy babies? Of course these were modern days, what would they have done with a live lamb, anyway?—and people didn’t go around killing babies any more. But you’d think there’d be something to take the place of these events, something—well, sybollic or whatever the word was and it might be important to recognise them. Mrs. Mace would understand, would at least be sympathetic and talk it all over; she had known them since before the baby even started, had been brushed by the very wings of Gabriel, bringing the message: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee… She could hardly wait to gather up her few shabby clothes and pack them into the cardboard box that must do for a suitcase. ‘You’ll look after things, Marilyn, love, just the couple of days? I’d like to have some good long talks with Mrs. Mace. You do think she’ll let me stay?’

  ‘It’s a big place; like, sort of, a hotel,’ said Jo. ‘But lovely, all them trees and flowers. And lots of nice people,’ he added, cautiously.

  ‘I thought it was a cottage? It’s only Mrs. Mace I want to see. I can be with her?’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. We’ve written and told her,’ fibbed Jo, ‘how good you’ve been to us.’

  ‘Me—good!’ she said. ‘When you think what you’ve done for me. Me being chosen! But still, there!—the last time it was only a pub-keeper, wasn’t it?’ The thought struck her that perhaps in fact it had been Meant that they should park outside the Dog that night, only a few doors down; that only through an error had they come to her. ‘Well, never mind, even if I wasn’t worthy to be chosen, fact remains it was me that got you; and reckernised you. First minute I saw you! I’ll never forget it.’ So beautiful, so quiet and undemanding, standing out there in the drizzle of the evening rain, Mary and Joseph and the promise of the Holy Child. And as they had been then, so they had remained: quiet, considerate, gentle; reserved, unemotional as she was emotional and out-giving; almost colourless, almost impersonal—a little apart from other human beings, from ordinary people like herself; and yet living with herself, close together in that little place with her for their only friend—the Mother and the Guardian of the Son of God; and the Word made flesh. She knelt and kissed the tiny hand. ‘I’ll come back to You, my little Lord. I’ll always love You and serve You, You know that. It’s only just that I want to know everything about You, I want to get things right, I want to ask Mrs. Mace.’ And all unaware of eyes watching from behind window curtains, balefully or pityingly or only with relief, she climbed into the battered little old car with Jo and drove away.

  Marilyn was nursing the baby when he got home. ‘You’ve got the place all cleared up,’ he said,
astonished at the change in it. ‘You must have been slaving.’

  ‘It kept my mind off things,’ she said. But still she did not ask what must be uppermost in her mind. ‘Without Mrs. Vaughan here, I must say there’s more room. Not as much as we had at Mrs. Mace’s—’

  ‘We couldn’t stay at Mrs. Mace’s once the nephew was coming home.’

  ‘No, I know. I was only saying.’ And now she did ask at last: ‘Did it go all right?’

  ‘Yes, not a murmur. A bit surprised when we got there, of course, but I kept urging her on, saying she’d be with Mrs. Mace.’

  ‘You found the place again, no trouble?’

  ‘Yes, I found it. A lovely spot, perfect, in the middle of all those woods.’

  ‘And Mrs Mace?’

  ‘Still there, quite O.K. A bit lonely, I daresay. She’ll be glad of company.’

  ‘They should get on fine.’ She smiled her own cool, quiet impersonal little smile, shifting the baby on her shoulder so that its fluffy head pressed, warm and sweet, against her cheek. ‘Well, she got her wish. You couldn’t call that a common grave.’

  ‘No, just her and Mrs. Mace; and right in the middle of them lovely woods like I told her, and all them flowers and the stream and all.’ He came across and ran a bent forefinger up the little channel at the back of the baby’s tender neck. ‘A shame to have to bash her,’ he said. ‘She was a kind old thing. But there you are, it’s so hard to find anywhere. We had to have the place.’

  Spring 1941

  I SPENT THE EARLY part of the war in digs near the Royal Herbert—military—Hospital where my husband was a surgeon. I remember that for five months, I never slept outside a shelter of some kind: of course Woolwich was bombed almost nightly, firstly because of the arsenal and the many troops stationed there, and secondly because it is on the Thames and any bombs the Germans didn’t drop on the way further into London, they seemed to unload just for luck, on the way home.