Jubilee (Book 1 of The Poppy Chronicles)

by Claire Rayner

  And then was jerked awake so sharply it made her catch her breath.

  ‘Hello, little missy.’ She did not turn her head, even though it was so strange a sound. She had never heard Ted speak, but this sound must be him; a thick sort of sound, bubbly and nasty, as nasty as that wet lower lip, and she sat and stared at the fire, her head held still on her rigid neck and said nothing.

  ‘Hello,’ he said again. ‘Look what I got to show you – just you look – I bet you never seen it before, eh, little missy? Come and look, then – an’ I’ll let you touch it if you like –’

  Still she sat as rigidly as she could, her eyes tight closed, willing him to go away back to the scullery. Her heart was beating thickly in her chest and she didn’t know why. All she knew was that she was very very frightened, and very very alone, and wanted her mother desperately, and that there was nothing she could do at all to change the way things were.

  And then his hand was on her shoulder and he was pulling her round so that she had to look at him, whether she liked it or not. And she didn’t like it at all for he looked so strange with his wet lips and wet eyes too, and his face was so red and excited and his hand was in front of him, low down in front of him and he was trying to make her look at what he was doing with it. And she knew she could not possibly and did the only thing that was possible. She opened her mouth and screamed.

  31

  By the time Mildred reached High Holborn, her throat was rasping and her eyes were running as though she were breaking her heart with grief. There had been fog about all day, heavy and yellowish, a threatening presence that sat above the chimneys and filled London with a sulphurous glow, but now it had become dark and therefore colder, the fog had been pressed downwards by the rising hot air from the chimneys as people came home from work and lit late fires, so that it had reached pavement level. She could hardly see more than a faint glow of light ahead of her now as she struggled from lamppost to lamppost and people seemed to loom vastly out of the gloom only a couple of feet in front of her, often bumping into her and then going on with either a muttered curse or an apology.

  She had told herself that High Holborn would be much better; it was a wider thoroughfare and much better lit, for there were not only the street lamps, but the lights that spilled from the great windows of shops like Gamage’s, and there were the buses too with men bearing huge flares walking in front of them. She’d be all right when she got to Holborn –

  But she wasn’t. She knew she’d reached the end of Leather Lane, because she recognized the broken doorstep of Nellie’s home, but all she could see ahead was unremitting gloom and fog, fog, fog. There was traffic and there were people; she could hear wheels rattling, albeit muffled by the thick air and occasional shouts, but she certainly could not see them, nor could she identify whether the buses were those she needed. So she shifted her parcel from one hand to the other, for the string handle was cutting into her flesh cruelly, in spite of her woollen glove, and with her freed right hand began to inch her way along the road by holding on to the wall.

  She wasn’t the only person to do that; and over and over again she bumped into someone coming in the opposite direction and using the same ploy, and each time there were tiresome moments of shuffling as they decided who should walk around whom. She was no more than a few hundred yards from her home and already she was exhausted.

  It was when at last she bumped into a policeman whose bull’s-eye lantern looked like little more than a feeble matchhead glow in the murk, that she realized that her expedition was hopeless.

  ‘Buses to St Paul’s, lady? Not a hope. They’re stranded all the way from ’ere to the Viaduct, and no one can move either way. They’re trying to lead people in convoys, and if you can make your way up to the Circus you’ll find there’s my mate there, leading people over to make sure they gets on the right line. Where d’you live, lady?’

  ‘Leather Lane,’ she said distractedly and tried to see the man’s face in the gloom, but all there was was the high shape of his helmet dimly outlined against the thick yellowness and only darkness under the brim where his face should be. ‘I have to make this delivery to Watling Street, though – it’s very important –’

  ‘Oh, don’t you try to do that, lady! You’ll never get there and back tonight. This ’ere pea souper’s in for the night, I reckon. You go ’ome and forget it, best thing you can do –’

  ‘But I promised –’ She was speaking as much to herself as to him, and turned her head to try and stare out along Holborn in the hope of seeing a bus arriving miraculously through the smoky darkness. ‘They’ll cancel the order if I don’t get there tonight –’

  ‘Listen, lady.’ The policeman sounded avuncular now, and he reached out and patted her heavily on the shoulder. ‘No one won’t be expecting any deliveries tonight, not nohow. They’ll know as no one can get through. Even if you got there it’s my guess you’d find the people’ve gone. It’s a business delivery, I take it? Well, it would be, wouldn’t it, being Watling Street. An’ all the office and shop people, they went early, I been told. City’s almost dead. You go ’ome, lady. Dare say your guv’nor’ll forgive you – he should understand –’

  ‘I run my own business,’ she said tartly, annoyed with herself for even bothering to say it. What difference did it make to him?

  ‘Better still. Go home, and get out of this. Fit to kill, this one is. There’ll be full churchyards if this goes on – good night to you, lady.’ And he melted away into the fog, disappearing entirely from view after only three or four paces.

  It was all that she could do, and she turned and once again shifted her burden from one hand to the other and coughed to clear her throat of the taste of soot, and started the painful shuffle along the wall that would take her back. At least she’d not be leaving Poppy as long as she would have had to, and she suddenly shivered as she thought of what would have happened if she had managed to get further afield and not been able to get home for long hours. Poppy alone with only that silly boy to watch over her – and she began to shuffle faster, needing to get home as soon as she could, and stopped apologizing to the people she cannoned into.

  The silence in Leather Lane was eerie, for even her own footsteps were muffled, and all she could hear was her own rasping and laboured breathing, and as she reached what she estimated to be the halfway mark along the street, just a few score of yards from home, she let her steps slacken, to give herself a chance to catch her breath. And then lifted her chin as she heard what seemed to be a faint mewling sound. A cat perhaps – But it was odd how very strange an effect the sound had on her, for it seemed to sharpen fear in her to a very remarkable degree, and to her own amazement she found herself almost running along the pavement, an extraordinarily difficult thing to do since it was like running head first into cotton wool.

  How she knew when she had reached her own front door she was never to understand, but there she was, fumbling with her key in the lock and listening at the same time with her head up; and then she heard it again and now she was terrified. For it was a scream and she knew without any shadow of doubt that the scream came from Poppy’s throat and that it was a repeat of the sound she had heard out there in the street. And as at last the door fell open, the key tumbling to the ground with a clatter, and she was inside and plunging along the passageway, almost falling over her parcel of cakes which she had dropped in front of her as she had come in, and not caring what damage she did to them as she trampled them, the sound from the kitchen came again, loud and clear, and filled her with terror.

  * * *

  Once she had started screaming Poppy had gone on and on, taking deep regular breaths and letting them out in a steady shrill sound, and doing it made her feel much better, because it worried Ted so dreadfully. She knew as soon as she looked at his face after her first scream that he was upset, for his blank silly face crumpled and his wet eyes looked even more wet and worried. He went on fiddling with himself in that same way, pushing towards her with
little jerks of his hips, yet keeping his feet firmly clamped to the spot, and when she stopped to breathe she heard what he was saying, over and over again.

  ‘It’s all right, missy, it’s all right. You can touch. I don’t mind, it’s all right – look, it’s all right –’ And then his voice was lost as again she shrieked, sitting there curled in the corner of the armchair by the fire, her mouth opening and filling the air of the kitchen, the hallway, the house, and the whole world with a noise that made her ears ache.

  ‘It’s all right –’ Ted’s face looked so worried now that she wanted to laugh instead of screaming. It was as though any minute he would start to cry, and the thought of a great big person like Ted crying was so funny that it was all she could do to keep on screaming. But she knew she had to, because if she didn’t he would stop being so worried and instead of crying would come closer to her and make her look and touch. And of all things she didn’t want to do it was that. She always turned her head away from the fishmonger’s stall as they went by, if there were eels there, all long and twisty and slimy; they were grey and what Ted wanted her to look at and touch wasn’t grey but a dull pinkish sort of colour and she wanted nothing to do with it. So even though her throat was beginning to hurt and her head to ache with the noise, she went on screaming, though not so loudly now, because it was quite hard work.

  She wasn’t at all suprised when the door burst open with a great clatter and there was Mama, her bonnet askew and her eyes wide and frightened and her face so white she looked like a bowl of her own flour. It seemed to Poppy the most natural thing in the world that she should come back now, and she closed her mouth gratefully, for now she could stop screaming. Mama would deal with this now and she turned her head away and put her face into the cushion at the back of her chair and closed her eyes, for she was very tired now. All she really wanted to do was go to sleep.

  But she couldn’t, for Mama was beside her and lifting her up and holding her and talking, talking, talking –

  ‘Poppy, oh, Poppy, what happened? Did he hurt you? What happened, my poor baby? Tell Mama. Oh, I should never have gone, I should have realized as soon as I went out that it was too thick. Are you all right, Poppy? Are you?’ – And then she hugged her so close that even if she had had any answers to all the questions she would have had no breath to make them with.

  Behind Mama’s back she heard a shuffling and looked over her shoulder and saw Ted scuttling across towards the door, trying to get past the other side of the kitchen table. He had his cap on and his head down so that she could not see his face, and Poppy was glad of that, and his coat and trousers were all buttoned up now and that made her even more glad.

  ‘Ted’s going away, Mama –’ she managed to say, in spite of Mildred’s bear hug, feeling she ought to know so that she could give him his money. That was what always happened when Nellie or any of her brothers went home; Mama fetched out her purse from her reticule and gave them their shillings and sixpences and said ‘Goodnight and thank you,’ politely. Mama would want to know Ted was going, definitely.

  Indeed she did. Poppy found herself dropped back into the armchair so suddenly it was almost as though she had been thrown there, as Mama darted to the door to block Ted’s way. She was standing there, glaring at him with her face even whiter than it had been, if that were possible.

  ‘What did you do to my baby?’ She said it so quietly that Poppy could hardly hear her and she felt her own face get as pink as Mama’s was white. It was one thing for Mama to call her her baby when she talked to Poppy herself; it was all wrong to call her that to other people, even horrible Ted, and she opened her mouth to protest that she wasn’t a baby, but a person who went to school – when she wasn’t ill, of course – and that meant she had to be called a child or a person, not a baby.

  But no one was paying any attention to her at all so she closed her mouth again. Ted was whimpering now, a soft watery sound that was quite sad really and Poppy managed to look at him, even though she disliked doing so, because of feeling sorry for him.

  He looked dreadful. His face was all twisted and he was crying, for there were tears on his narrow drooping cheeks and his eyes looked red and Poppy for the first time ever thought that perhaps he wasn’t so horrible after all. He was just miserable and she wanted to go over and say to him, ‘It’s all right –’ the way he had kept saying it to her. But she didn’t. Mama would not have been at all pleased. That was something Poppy was very certain about.

  ‘What did you do?’ Mama said again and her voice was so hard and sharp that it made Poppy want to cry too, and she knew even more certainly that Ted wasn’t horrible after all, just sad.

  ‘He didn’t do anything, Mama,’ she said. She had to say it because it was all so hateful in here with Mama looking at Ted like that. ‘He didn’t do anything –’

  Mama looked at her, letting her eyes shift but keeping her head still and that reminded Poppy of the way Ted used to look at her and that was nasty. ‘Then why were you screaming?’

  ‘I was frightened.’

  ‘Why?’

  Poppy felt her face begin to get tight and twisted, like Ted’s. She was going to cry again; that dreadful crying feeling that came so often now, since she had been ill, was coming back and it made her throat feel as though it were full of sharp pins and needles.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she wailed and stopped trying not to cry. It was easier to let the tears come and now they were flooding down her cheeks. ‘I want to go to bed –’

  ‘All right –’ Mama came away from the door and held her close. ‘It’s all right, baby, I’ll put you to bed. Just be patient – now, you –’ And her voice sharpened and she looked over her shoulder at Ted.

  ‘You. I saw what you were doing, I know what you were going to do, you evil creature, you hateful – ah, you make me sick!’ And it really sounded to Poppy as though Mama was going to be sick, just as she herself had been beside the big ship the day she first got ill. ‘If Poppy says you did nothing, I’ll believe her. I think I got back in time, thank God, and stopped you. Get out, you hear me? Get out. I never want to see you again, ever, nor any of the people to do with you. Tell your sister – tell Nellie the same thing. Never ever will any of you ever come near me and mine – get out – you hear me? Out, out, out!’ And now it was Mama who was shouting and the novelty of that made Poppy stop crying and lift her chin to look into her face.

  Ted went, half running and half falling out of the kitchen and then down the passageway, and they heard the door slam behind him as they both remained there in silence, and Mildred held Poppy close and stared blankly over her head at the swinging kitchen door.

  After a long time Mama spoke, and her voice sounded cracked and tight as though her throat had gone dry. ‘Are you sure he did nothing to you?’

  Poppy shook her head. ‘No, Mama, he just kept saying – “it’s all right, look, it’s all right and I’ll let you touch.” I didn’t want to touch anything! Why did he want me to touch him?’

  Mildred took a sharp little breath and slowly let her knees buckle so that she fell into the armchair rather than sat in it, with Poppy on her lap.

  ‘Oh, how do I explain? Oh, Poppy, my dear child, how do I begin to explain and you, such a baby? Such a thing that would be, to fill your head with such horrors –’

  Poppy shook her head irritably. ‘It wasn’t horrors,’ and then stopped. She knew the word and what it meant, of course; Mama had told her all the words she ever saw in her books and she knew Ted wasn’t a ghost or anything like that. ‘It wasn’t,’ she said again. ‘It was silly. Undoing his trousers and wanting me to touch. The boys at school do it sometimes but they don’t want you to touch.’ And she said it witheringly.

  ‘The boys at –’ Mildred took a deep breath and closed her eyes. This was getting worse and worse, and she felt as though she were trying to swim in a sea of mud which was threatening to close over her head and drown her. ‘What do you mean, the boys at school?’

&
nbsp; ‘They do it all the time,’ Poppy said, and snuggled closer to Mildred. It was nice sitting on Mama’s lap. ‘They show the girls their peepees and the girls laugh and shout at them and the boys do it again and then the whistle blows and we all go back to lessons. But they never say, “touch me”. And it’s never like that nasty Ted. He was nasty –’ She shook her head, puzzled. ‘It was like school only it wasn’t. It was because he was so frightened. Ted was ever so frightened, so I was too.’

  ‘Oh, Poppy, Poppy, what have I done to you?’ Mildred was staring down at her with her face just as distressed as Ted’s had been. ‘What sort of life am I giving you here? I’m a selfish – I can’t do this to you. But what else can I do? What possible choices do I have?’

  ‘You didn’t do anything, Mama,’ Poppy said and wriggled down from her lap to go and sit on her own little stool by the fender. She was tired of being on Mama’s lap like a baby. She was big Poppy now that Ted was gone and taken all the fright away with him. And, she suddenly realized, she was staying up late without having had to ask or fuss at all. And she wriggled with pleasure as she sat on her stool, not wanting to go to bed at all now and amazed that she had wanted to before.

  ‘I did.’ Mildred was still sitting there, her pelisse on her shoulders and her bonnet hanging by its strings over her shoulders. ‘You need a decent clean quiet place, not this – this hateful slum – oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?’ And to Poppy’s terror she burst into tears and sat there with them coursing down her cheeks and making no effort at all to control or conceal them. It was a dreadful sight and again Poppy felt fear rising in her.

  She scrambled to her feet and stood there pulling at her pinafore, trying to unbutton it. ‘Mama, I want to go to bed,’ she said loudly. ‘Please, Mama? I’m ever so tired I want to go to bed –’