by Ros Franey
‘Who’s everyone? What’s it got to do with them? It’s what Daddy and us want, isn’t it?’
Beatrice hesitated. ‘Perhaps Daddy does want it.’
‘How on earth can he want to marry an old stick like her?’
‘Perhaps because he’s lonely,’ said Beatrice. ‘Like – like Mr Rochester.’
‘But it’s not fair on our mother!’
‘She’s not here, though, is she?’
‘She’s in Heaven! She’s watching us! She’d know.’
Beatrice stared out of the window. ‘Maybe she wouldn’t mind,’ she said softly. Then she turned back into the room. ‘What are we on about?’ She laughed. ‘It’s probably not even going to happen!’
But it did. It happened at Spring half-term, when Fred was home from school. It was a Wednesday night and I was waiting for Miss Higgs to go out to her harmonium practice as usual when it dawned on me she wasn’t going. This was odd. I was playing Snakes and Ladders with Fred, who didn’t bother to disguise the fact he was bored. Everything seemed to bore him since he came home from school; the only thing he liked talking about was how ‘super’ it was there, a word he would definitely not have used before he went. I noticed he had laid out his train set upstairs, though, and Desmond was still curled up on his bed.
‘Shall we go and play with your trains?’ I asked him. I didn’t want to be in the same room as Miss Higgs.
Fred whooshed up a big ladder. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘We’ll finish this if you like.’
‘I want you both to stay down here,’ Miss Higgs told us. ‘Your father will be home soon and he wants to talk to you.’
I darted a look at her. What was this? ‘Beatrice isn’t back,’ I said.
‘Beatrice is with your father.’
‘Is this why you aren’t going to the Mission tonight?’ I asked.
‘Curiosity killed the Cat,’ she replied.
‘Sorry, Missiggs.’ I swung my legs under the table. Satisfaction brought it back, I echoed silently to Little Sid in my pocket.
‘Oh crumbs, you’re on that big snake!’ cried Fred, who was counting ahead of me.
‘No I’m not – I got a five.’
‘Five gets you to the big snake.’
‘Oh no, does it? Rats!’
‘Annie!’ warned Miss Higgs.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Is Rats a bad word, Miss Higgs?’
‘Don’t be insolent,’ she snapped.
I could feel the demons rising within me. Sometimes I just can’t stop them. ‘Li-i-ike…’
I was going to say Crikey but Fred shot me a fierce look. Crikey, which I can’t even write down what it means, would have got me sent to bed and I was desperate to know what Daddy was going to talk to us about. Fortunately, Miss Higgs let it go.
About ten minutes later, when Fred had won Snakes and Ladders by miles, the door opened and Daddy came in, followed by Beatrice. Bea wore an air of Importance. She wouldn’t meet my eye. I sat up very straight. This was serious. Daddy crossed the room to the fire where Miss Higgs was sitting and warmed his hands at it. I couldn’t see whether he smiled at her or anything like that. Then he straightened up on the hearthrug and turned to face us. Beatrice sat down on the sofa with her hands folded in her lap. Fred swivelled round from the table where he had been packing up the Snakes and Ladders board and looked at Daddy expectantly.
Daddy cleared his throat. He was smiling. ‘It’s Wednesday,’ he began. ‘And on Wednesday evenings Miss Higgs usually goes to practise the harmonium at the Mission.’
We waited.
‘She isn’t going tonight because Miss Higgs will not be playing at the Mission any longer.’
This was a surprise. ‘Oh!’ I said. I stared at her. Miss Higgs was sitting in the fireside chair with her face turned away, looking into the flames.
Daddy continued, ‘She won’t be playing at the Mission any longer because she will be a married woman.’
I felt dizzy. I closed my eyes. In the fraction of a second that followed I had time to make-believe she might be marrying an undertaker and moving to Worksop and we’d be free of her for ever.
‘Children, Miss Higgs and I are to be married. She will be your new mother. You may call her Mother from now on.’
I had known it, of course, the way one always seems to know really, really bad news. I forced myself to keep looking at Daddy and I hoped he would not see that my eyes had gone glassy with tears. I dared not reach into my pocket for my handkerchief.
None of us spoke. There was nothing to say. My throat ached trying to hold down the sobs and I terribly needed to sniff. I couldn’t imagine what Fred would be feeling; I daren’t catch his eye. Daddy filled the silence by going on about how this was a happy day and would bring joy to Corporation Oaks and how grateful he was that she, he called her Agnes, had consented to take him on, and his three children, and how it was a huge honour and we were really lucky and God was smiling and … he didn’t say whether Our Own Mother would be smiling or not. Beatrice said she would make a cup of tea and I fled to the kitchen to help her, so as to blow my nose. Not a word was spoken as I assembled cups and saucers with a lot of clattering because my fingers were twitching in shock. Bea warmed the pot and boldly added a plate of biscuits from the Roebuck’s Biscuits Christmas Celebration tin, which were not generally permitted on Wednesdays. I suppose we drank our tea in the sitting room but I can’t remember any more. I went to bed. Oh, I hung around in the room for a bit because I didn’t know what to call her. I felt I ought to curtsey or something. She sat by the fire looking regal, sort of serene, Beatrice said later, but I thought she just looked smug.
‘Goodnight Missmm …’
‘Goodnight, Annie,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget to say your prayers.’
I’m not going to talk about the wedding because I can’t remember it. All I remember is that there was no cascading white lace dress like my mother wore in the photograph album. I know what she looked like though, because – like Our Own Mother’s wedding – I have seen the photo of Miss Higgs and Daddy that day many times. Miss Higgs was married in a suit. You can’t see in the photo but I remember it as a sort of blancmange colour which is not quite white, with a long straight jacket and a neat white blouse peeping through the fox fur around her neck. The suit skirt was straight to below the knee and then gathered into little pencil pleats, quite modern even for Jessops at the time, falling to just above her ankles in a continuous line, not balloony. She wore flat shoes with bars across and round toes; I thought the suit would look better with heels but Beatrice pointed out that she would then have been taller than Daddy, which would not have done, as they walked down the aisle or in the photographs. Her hat was a sort of custard cloche with a little net veil and behind it her long pale face looked grave and rather dignified as she gazed over the photographer’s shoulder to a point in the distance. For the first time I could see why she might be thought of as beautiful in a way. What you can’t even see in the photo, of course, is her hair which is probably her best feature. She generally wears it smooth and pulled back with a black Alice band; it’s fastened in a bun at the nape of her neck. In the photo of his wedding to Our Own Mother, Daddy is looking very handsome and jolly. In the marriage to Miss Higgs he looks serious, like her. I said to Beatrice, Look, he’s not smiling this time, and Bea replied that it wouldn’t be right for him to grin from ear to ear with it being his second marriage and his poor beloved first wife sadly deceased and everything. So I was really pleased about this and agreed that it was fitting. I’d have looked serious if I was marrying Miss Higgs.
I began to watch for ways in which life might change now she was no longer a housekeeper but the Lady of the House. At first I could notice nothing; life went on much as before, for which I was grateful, except we had the sitting room redecorated in sort of pale beige wallpaper with something Beatrice called a ‘self pattern’ of leaves and ferns. There was also a new curtain to pull across the bay, shutting out the table on Winte
r nights. It was made of green prickly wool and cascaded to the floor from large round wooden rings that clicked along the metal curtain pole with a comfortable clack-clack. I thought it was like the theatre: a whole new world could happen behind that curtain and you would never know.
But the first real change was nothing to do with life at home. When Miss Higgs stopped playing the harmonium at the Mission, her job was taken over by a new person, a girl really, called Mildred Blessing. At first, I thought she must be very holy on account of having a face like the little angels on Christmas cards and a name out of the Bible, but Beatrice explained this was not necessarily so; it was just a name, like ours was Lang. Miss Blessing was very young, only a few years older than Beatrice herself, and she played the harmonium beautifully; after service she would sometimes play tinkly, intricate pieces, which Mother had never played when she was Miss Higgs. I used to love sitting along the pew at the far right so I could watch Miss Blessing play.
One day, to my utter awe and astonishment she came to service not in the usual black buttoned boots that we all wore, but in a pair of blue high-heeled shoes. Well, not very high, but with heels that definitely raised the back of her feet off the ground, with a little flourish that went in and out, like the turned legs of our fireside stool. I watched her feet, transfixed as she manipulated the narrow wooden pedals, terrified one of her heels would skid off and get stuck in the gap between, launching a terrible drone or clarion call – for, like the stops, the pedals did strange and wonderful things, producing angel trumpets from the heavens, and from the deep, other sorts of noises like boiling sulphur and moans of torment. But Miss Blessing’s feet stayed deftly in control with never a slip. She had a lot of lightish, brownish hair, over which she wore a hat with a bunch of silk forget-me-nots pinned to the hatband, and the blue of the flowers exactly matched her shoes. She was more like a fairy from Fairyland than a girl from the Golgotha Mission.
Miss Blessing sometimes taught Sunday School, and the week after the Shoes first appeared I was excited to know whether she would wear them again. My disappointment when she walked in in the usual old boots was impossible to contain.
‘Oh Miss Blessing,’ I said. ‘You aren’t wearing your wonderful shoes!’ It just came out before I could stop myself. Luckily there were no other grown-ups in the room. Some of the girls giggled. I scarcely dared look up at her, thinking she would be angry, because people were always angry whenever you spoke out of turn. But Mildred Blessing was smiling a little ruefully.
‘I know, Annie. It’s a great shame. I couldn’t help wearing them once, because they were new!’
‘But you must wear them again!’ I cried, emboldened by her smile. ‘There’s no point having blue shoes if you can’t wear them for your Sunday Best!’
‘I don’t think it was right to wear them to Mission,’ she said firmly. And a deep blush spread over her cheeks and her large dark eyes clouded for a moment and then flashed with a something. ‘Now, children,’ she went on briskly. ‘Open your Bibles at St Luke chapter fifteen, verse eleven. Today we’re going to hear the story of the Prodigal Son.’
I stared at her. I knew that expression. It was how my own face looked when I got into trouble. It was completely obvious to me that someone must have had words with Miss Blessing about the Shoes. She had been reprimanded. And now she was the Prodigal Son and had returned to the fold. I shook my head and tried to concentrate. But then there was the last bit of the expression – the most important bit: it was defiance. She wanted to wear those blue shoes to Mission, and she wouldn’t have swallowed the cod liver oil, either: we were alike, Miss Mildred Blessing and me. Each Sunday service I tried to sit at the end of the row and observe if she ever dared wear the Shoes again. But Daddy wanted us to have the best seats near the middle aisle and would stand back for us to file into the centre of the pew and he took to sitting at the far end, though the blue shoes would have been lost on him. So I never did find out – or at least not till later.
About the first event in my life after the wedding was the Mundella Easter Pageant. On the day of the casting, I rushed home with important news. I so wanted Daddy to be there, but of course he wasn’t.
‘It’s Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ I told Miss Higgs. ‘I’m the First Fairy.’ I said it in capital letters so she would know how very important it was. ‘Hail Fairy, wither wander you? – That’s Puck. He says that.’ Then, leaping across the room to be me, ‘Over Hill, Over Dale, Thoro Bush, Thoro Briar, Over Park, Over Pale—’ Miss Higgs, who I shall call Mother from now on, was drying her fingers on the roller towel. I broke off when she turned and I saw her face.
‘We’ll see about that,’ she said.
‘We did it last term,’ I babbled. ‘I know it already almost. I do wander EVERYWHERE, swifter than the Moon-es sphere.’ I knew I ought to stop, but some demon inside me wouldn’t. ‘You have to say “Moon-es”, you know, because of the rhythm, the meter: The mountain sheep are sweeter but the valley sheep are fatter, we therefore deemed it meeter to carry off the latter.’
‘Annie! Come and wash your hands for tea.’
I went to the sink and picked up the slithery cake of green carbolic.
‘Easter Pageant,’ Mother said. ‘I’d like to ask Mrs Spencer what it has to do with the death and resurrection of Our Lord, all this carry-on.’
‘It’s only one scene – 3C are doing Moses in the Bullrushes.’ I shot her a sideways look to see how this went down.
‘That’s another matter,’ she said. ‘Tableaux are another matter. This is …’ She hesitated. She didn’t seem to know what it was. ‘A play.’
‘Not the whole play, just—’
‘A scene. A scene with words.’
I finally came down to earth at that point. Maybe she was going to stop me doing it or something. ‘Shakespeare,’ I reminded her in a little voice.
‘The author is immaterial, Annie. You know my views.’
I knew them. I sat down at the tea table in silence. ‘Please may I start?’ I asked.
‘You’ll wait for your sister. Where is Beatrice?’
‘She had to go and see Mr Remington about …’ I didn’t want to say. Beatrice had to go and see Mr Remington about her part in the school pageant. ‘Something,’ I mumbled. ‘She won’t be long.’ I didn’t want to discuss it further. Better save it for Daddy first.
But Miss Higgs, Mother, was in her element now. She started on about the theatre being the ‘espousal’ of vanity and this seemed to be my fault, ‘getting above’ myself, she said. ‘What makes you think Our Lord wants to see you making an exhibition of yourself on a stage?’
I looked down at my plate, at the friendly faces of the little pink and white flowers crowding across it, May Medley by Royal Standard. It always came back to this, the sin of showing-off, the sin of pride. Why, after all, should anyone, never mind the Lord, want to hear me going on as the First Fairy? ‘Don’t know,’ I muttered.
‘Blessed are the meek,’ she intoned. ‘Why?’
‘For they shall inherit the earth.’
‘Don’t mumble. Repeat.’
I did so. I didn’t want to inherit the earth. I just wanted to play First Fairy.
‘Continue.’
‘Blessed are …’ I could only do the whole thing on a run. ‘The merciful?’
‘Wrong.’
‘Blessed are.’
‘They which—’ Mother prompted.
‘They which do hunger and thirst after righteousness because—’
‘For.’
‘For they shall be filled.’
‘You can read St Matthew chapter five after tea. You clearly need to refresh your memory.’
‘I’ve got equations,’ I wailed. Another mistake.
‘In that case you can get up an hour early and read it before piano practice.’
I glared at the potted meat sandwiches. Mother always did this, popped your balloon with her hatpin. But then I had this thought: ‘Mother?’
�
�Yes, Annie?’
‘You know when you used to play the harmonium at the Mission …’
‘What about it?’
You see, this is what happens: I say things. I walk into it. I can’t stop myself. A chasm opened up between the plate of sliced tongue and the fish paste. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Mother shot me one of her looks. ‘Finish your sentence, girl.’
‘I – I’m not saying he, that is He, the Lord, considered you playing the harmonium a vanity or anything like that, but – might the Lord accept me doing Shakespeare not as vanity but, sort of, as an offering – you know, in praise of Him?’
Mother’s eyes were like glass needles.
‘So each to his own …’ I blundered on. ‘If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb … if you see what I mean, Mother?’
But before she could reply the kitchen door flew open to reveal Beatrice, glowing. ‘Oh Mother,’ she cried. ‘We’re doing Pandora’s Box and I’m to play Hope!’
SIX
In the end, Daddy said we could perform in the school pageant. He said something about Talent being a gift from God, after all. Beatrice hugged him but I was trying very hard not to crow in front of her so I said ‘thank you’ politely and got out of the room and shut the door as quietly as I could. And then I raced upstairs two at a time to take down the pink crepe paper Mrs Spencer had given me, which I’d had to hide on top of the wardrobe.
So nothing more was said on the subject and life at Corporation Oaks went on quietly, with Beatrice and me leaving most of ourselves in the classroom and doing just demure things at home, like needlework and cutting roses out of the pink crepe paper but taking care not to drop bits. My dress had been Marjorie Bagshaw’s bridesmaid’s frock: it was cream net over a long cream taffeta skirt, trimmed at the hem, neck and sleeves with Nottingham lace, of course. The crepe-paper roses were to be stitched to the overskirt and I was to have a pink sash from Mrs Spencer’s daughter, Kathleen. The question was: who would do the stitching? My own needlework was dismal. My embroidered coal-glove had been the class joke and the invisible hemming on my needlework folder so visible that it was constantly being ripped undone by the teacher. It had taken a term and a half to hem, by which time everyone else had finished their woven egg cosies and were starting on their sampler.
