An Episode of Sparrows

by Rumer Godden

  “Ugh!” said Vincent.

  “It wasn’t ugh,” said Lovejoy. “People used to cry.”

  “But why did you stop?” asked Tip. “Why didn’t you go on dancing?”

  “My little teeth fell out,” said Lovejoy.

  To Tip, to all the children in Catford Street, the coming out of a first tooth was something to be proud of. “I got sixpence,” said Tip, “and threepence for each one after.” For most it was proud, but for Lovejoy it had been a tragedy.

  “Did you say she could leave that child here?” Cassie asked Mrs. Combie in her loud aggressive voice.

  “She has to be left somewhere,” said Mrs. Combie helplessly.

  Lovejoy had come willy-nilly to accept that. It could have been much worse; Mrs. Combie was kind, Vincent was very kind, but for Mrs. Combie there was really only Vincent and for Vincent there was only the restaurant. Lovejoy was a little extra tacked on.

  She had never heard of a vortex but she knew there was a big hole, a pit, into which a child could be swept down, a darkness that sucked her down so that she ceased to be Lovejoy, or anyone at all, and was a speck in thousands of specks—“Millions,” said Lovejoy, and then there was something called “no one.”

  She knew how easily that could happen because once she had been lost. I was only six then, thought Lovejoy; she was nearly eleven now but she had not forgotten it. She was lost and she was a speck and there was no one. It had been when her mother was out of work and they were moving restlessly about. At the police station they had asked Lovejoy questions.

  “Where do you live?”

  “We don’t live anywhere.”

  “Where did you spend last night?”

  “In London,” said Lovejoy promptly.

  “What place in London?”

  “London,” said Lovejoy.

  “This is London,” said the woman police constable gently.

  “No, this isn’t London,” said Lovejoy certainly. “London was last night.”

  The constable tried again. “You don’t know where you stayed?”

  “We don’t stay,” said Lovejoy gravely. “We can’t, because of the bill. They want us to pay it so we go somewhere else.”

  “Somewhere else?”

  “Yes. That’s where we were going,” said Lovejoy.

  Nowadays she was left behind; all she had of her mother, most of the time, was a pack of postcards she carried in the pocket of her coat. When her mother did come home—Catford Street had become home now—Lovejoy was kept away from school, though Mrs. Combie had told Mrs. Mason about the inspector. “What does she care? She isn’t here when he comes,” said Cassie.

  Lovejoy was too useful to be spared; she washed and ironed her mother’s clothes and brushed her mother’s hair; she played the gramophone, ran out for a paper of chips, fetched in beer. Though Lovejoy’s legs were strong they ached by the end of the day. “How do you expect to get on?” her teacher, Miss Cobb, would say when Lovejoy appeared in school again. Lovejoy, sadly, did not expect to.

  She took a long time, now, to spell out the words on the packet. Cornflower (Cyanus minor)—she could not make anything of that—double blue. Double blue what? Hardy annual, two and a half feet. What’s an annual? Very showy for borders. In bloom from June to September. Sow in March or April—That’s now, thought Lovejoy—in any good garden soil, raked fine. Cover the seeds lightly. When the seedlings come up, thin well.

  When she had managed to read through that, Lovejoy slit the packet open; she was careful not to break into the blue painted flowers—cornflowers, as she knew now. Inside was a small, very small, white envelope. Blooming cheats, thought Lovejoy, to put a little one into such a big one. She took out the small envelope and felt it; it was filled with something that felt like grains, but such tiny ones that, pinched together, they felt soft, like a tiny pillow, and yet they were grainy. She broke a corner of the envelope and shook it out into her hand; each seed looked like an insect with a white-looking body that had a white overskin, covering something dark, and, at one end, a minute fuzz of a head, golden colour.

  Lovejoy tried to crack one with her teeth, but it was unexpectedly hard. She looked at it again. The seed is the dark part, she thought. She leaned against the pillar of the portico; a patch of sun had made it almost warm, and she felt warm too and, now that she was not out of breath from running, comfortable and interested. She looked at the dark part of the seed again; it was like knowing a person was there under a disguise, she thought. “Pooh, it isn’t as big as a pin,” she said—she meant the head of a pin. How could it grow into a flower, a double blue flower, two and a half feet high? “I don’t believe it,” said Lovejoy.

  She nearly threw the packet away; but after a moment she put the seeds back into the envelope, put it in the packet, and tucked that into the pocket of her old plaid coat. Then, because she, like all the children, found it easier to jump and skip and hop than to walk, she began to skip home.

  CHAPTER V

  IF ANYONE observant had been walking or driving down Catford Street to the river, he might have seen a little restaurant; he would have had to be observant because it did not strike the eye; once seen, it was remarkable.

  At the river end of the Street the houses were older than the Victorian ones farther up with their stucco and porticoes and railed-off areas. The river-end houses were built of small dark bricks; most of them had ugly shops built out to the pavement, but the house with the restaurant, flat-fronted and pleasing, had been put back as it was, and its door opened onto a small forecourt paved with cobbles. The restaurant had two half-lantern windows of rounded glass. “Twenty pounds each, those cost,” said Mrs. Combie.

  “Twenty-three,” said Vincent proudly.

  Under the windows, standing on the cobbles, were two pyramid bay trees, their dark leaves fresh and clean. “He washes them,” said Mrs. Combie.

  “Washes them?” Cassie had never heard of trees being washed.

  “With a spray,” said Mrs. Combie. She was half bitter, half proud about those bay trees. “They get cut by the frost and that’s the end of them,” she said. “He spent seven pounds on those alone last year.”

  The little trees were astonishingly pretty; like the crimson sling Sparkey’s mother wore, their colour stood out in the Street; their shapes were well clipped, the bands on their oak tubs were freshly painted. Between the windows was a plate-glass door with a polished brass handle; it looked inviting, and at night an apricot light shone onto the pavement from inside. On the brown oak panel across the house front, in dim gold letters, was written VINCENT’S. To anyone with accustomed eyes it looked a restaurant that might have been in Dover Street or St. James’s, perhaps in Soho, but very few people who came down Catford Street had eyes like that.

  It had been a restaurant before, the Victoria Dining Rooms. Then it had belonged to Mrs. Combie’s father and had had an ordinary ugly window like the other shops—“Only we didn’t know it was ugly,” said Mrs. Combie yearningly. Then it had the ordinary electric lights, as in the other shops, glaring down, and long tables with green and white oilcloth slips, and a slate in the window on which was chalked:

  Egg and chips 10d.

  Sausage, bacon, tomato and chips 1/9

  Bacon, egg and chips 1/6

  Steak pie. 2 veg. 2/6

  Cold meat and bubble 1/2

  Good hot home-made dinners always ready from twelve o’clock.

  Pull up for car-men.

  Mrs. Combie had cooked the good hot home-made dinners; she had thought she was a good cook until she met Vincent, who said she did not know how to cook at all. “English cooking is uneatable,” said Vincent. Mrs. Combie knew that was not true, plenty of people had eaten hers, but there was certainly something magical in Vincent’s.

  “He takes a duck,” she told Cassie, “and puts it in an earthenware cocotte—”

  “What’s an earthenware cocotte?”

  “A deep oval pan,” said Mrs. Combie, “made of earthenware. He
puts the duck in whole, with butter—”

  “Butter. For cooking?” said Cassie. “You mean lard.” But Mrs. Combie was sure it was butter.

  “He only half cooks the duck, it must be still red; in another pan he fries some button mushrooms—”

  “With more butter, I suppose?” said Cassie sarcastically.

  “More butter,” said Mrs. Combie and sighed as she thought of the price. “Mushrooms and little onions and bacon cut into bits,” she went on, “and herbs and seasoning; he lets them get nice and brown, then separately he makes a good brown sauce and puts in a glass of sherry.”

  “Sherry! Wine! What a wicked waste,” said Cassie, impressed in spite of herself.

  “Then he cuts up the duck, on a dish so as not to lose any blood—”

  “Ugh!” said Cassie with a ladylike shudder.

  “—and puts it back in the cocotte with the mushrooms and onions and bacon and pours the sauce over it all and shuts it up tightly and puts it in the oven.”

  “That’s a nice expensive way of cooking,” said Cassie. “Who does he think’s going to pay to eat that?”

  “People do,” said Mrs. Combie.

  “Not in Catford Street,” said Cassie.

  That was what nagged Mrs. Combie and would not go out of her mind. “I should have let him have his way and open somewhere else,” she said. “Somewhere up West. But how could I?” she asked. “Even if we sold up here we shouldn’t have had enough.”

  “You haven’t enough here,” said Cassie.

  “We’re on the river. The best people like the river,” Vincent argued, but the river here was not the same as the river at Chelsea or farther up at Westminster, a polite stretch of river; here only a huddle of wharves and warehouses and sheds showed where it was, but Vincent would not give up hope. He used to come out every evening and stand at the edge of the cobbles, looking up and down the Street. “We must remember it’s out of the way,” said Vincent.

  “Is it?” asked Mrs. Combie. As she had lived in Catford Street all her life—“Though we came from Cornwall once upon a time,” said Mrs. Combie—it seemed to her right in the way.

  The restaurant did not prosper; a few people drifted in from the block of flats along the river, and one or two came who looked, Mrs. Combie thought, as if they lived in the Square, but no one who, as Vincent said, really paid for a meal. “I told you. I should have started up West,” said Vincent restlessly.

  There was one regular client—Vincent liked to call them clients rather than customers—who came every Wednesday night and for lunch on Sundays. Mrs. Combie guessed that was when his housekeeper had her days off.

  He was a thick, small man and his manners were strangely gross; he made loud noises when he ate, and spattered the tablecloth; his clothes were not spattered only because he tucked his napkin into his collar. “Why does he come?” asked Vincent irritably.

  “I think he likes your cooking,” said Mrs. Combie.

  “Probably never has a decent meal in his own house,” said Vincent.

  “I think he lives in those flats along the river.”

  “All sorts of people live in them,” said Vincent loftily.

  His name, they discovered, was Mr. Manley. One night he asked if he could pay for his dinner by check. “He hasn’t put an initial,” said Mrs. Combie, looking lovingly at it. It was good to think of one pound, seven shillings, and nine-pence going into the account.

  “Thinks he’s the only Manley in London,” said Vincent. “Probably the bank will send it back.” But the bank passed it through without comment.

  Vincent was fastidious and he did not like serving Mr. Manley but he should have known better; Mr. Manley certainly knew what food should be and he spent more money than anyone else on the ungrateful Vincent.

  He always had a plain dinner, one dish, a chateaubriand or escalope de veau or tête de veau vinaigrette, a salad, properly dressed—“I always thought dressing was salad cream,” said Mrs. Combie—cheese, Stilton or Camembert, and a bottle of wine.

  He never praised Vincent, merely nodded if things were right. Vincent resented that. “Real people, of course, don’t flatter,” he told Lovejoy, but Mr. Manley hardly came into that category. For Vincent there were two races of humans, people and real people, “People who are Somebodies,” he told Lovejoy reverently.

  What Mrs. Combie found most difficult of all to understand was that he wanted the restaurant to be expensive. She had always thought cheapness an asset but that, it seemed, was wrong, and it was wrong, puzzlingly wrong, to try and save money. “This kitchen’s full of washing,” Vincent often complained.

  “I do it between three o’clock and six, George, when the kitchen’s empty; the stove is hot then and the things dry.” If the washing were not hanging up it was being ironed. They had kept her father’s big old-fashioned range, and, “I can heat the irons on the stove when it’s hot, for nothing, George,” said Mrs. Combie, but Vincent did not feel the charm of that. “It’s squalid,” he said, offended.

  There was certainly a great deal of washing, but that, again, was Vincent, not Mrs. Combie; if the cloths and serviettes—he called them napkins—had a speck on them he would put them in the bag, and his shirts with their stiff fronts and collars were changed every day. “Send them to the laundry,” he said in his lordly way.

  “We can’t afford the laundry, George.”

  “We must. Our linen must be white and glossy, starched, perfectly white and glossy. You can’t get them like that.”

  “I will,” said Mrs. Combie, but sometimes she failed. After a time, on Catford Street, the best washing turned grey, and then Vincent was almost mortally hurt. “I can’t wear them like that,” he would say, his nostrils pinched. “What is the use of trying to have things nice?”

  “I’ll try again, George,” said Mrs. Combie.

  There were many women like Mrs. Combie in Catford Street; from most of the houses an incense went up, an incense of faith and courage, and part of the courage was in the day-long battle for cleanliness. It was fought for the houses, but also against the houses; some of them, like the restaurant house, had stood a hundred years in soot and fog and dirt; they were ingrained with grime. Every morning Mrs. Combie washed her doorstep, scrubbed and whitened it, and immediately the feet coming in and out made it black again. Once a week she scrubbed down the three flights of stairs and turned out each room; she washed the curtains and cleaned the windows, and the smuts from the power station came in and blackened them all again, or, in the winter the fog came down, particularly here by the river, thick, grey-yellow fog, polluting everything. All up and down the Street the battle was fought and, usually, won. Out of those dark houses came babies with white clothes, starched white pillows, and pale pink and blue covers on their perambulators; the children playing in the Street were dirty, it was true, but if they were going out, to the shops or to school, they were clean from head to foot; the young men had glossy hair and boots, clean shirts, brushed suits; the girls came out in crisp cottons, white blouses, fresh collars and cuffs. Angela often talked to her committees about the amazing dirt in the Street; she did not know how amazingly clean it was. “The women look so old,” said Olivia. That was natural; the cotton frocks, the perambulator covers, even the boys’ glossy boots, did not have the wear and the tear the women had. Mrs. Combie was sallow because she went out of the house only to do some quick shopping; her back between her shoulders looked small and frail and stooped, and her hands were big and knotted. “Oh well,” she said, “I never was pretty. Cassie was the pretty one,” she said.

  “You’re much, much prettier than Cassie,” said Lovejoy vehemently but added, “Cassie isn’t pretty at all.”

  While Mrs. Combie wore slippers and a flowered overall, Vincent was always correctly dressed; he had dark trousers, a striped cotton jacket when he cleaned the restaurant or laid the tables, a white jacket for cooking, and for waiting a tail coat, white dress shirt, black butterfly bow tie, and a watch-chain that lo
oked expensive, though Lovejoy knew it ended in a safety pin. He changed at lightning speed; everything he did was quick and neat. He worked frantically and sometimes he looked so thin, so tired, his skin so transparent—like Sparkey’s, who, they said, would not live to grow up—that Mrs. Combie’s heart turned over.

  He was a fine pale little man with a little moustache that looked like down, like two brown moths, thought Lovejoy, on his upper lip. He had grey eyes that could blaze with excitement; their pupils could grow small and dark if he were angry, which was often, and wide and bright if he were upset, which was more often; they were, if Mrs. Combie had only known it, a fanatic’s eyes.

  “You are really Mr. Combie?” Lovejoy asked him.

  “No, I’m really Vincent,” he said.

  Lovejoy liked to be with Vincent. She used to watch him write the menus with a fine pen and mauve ink; he made such flourishes that hardly anyone could read what he had written. That disturbed Mrs. Combie.

  “Shouldn’t we put a card in the window to say what there is to eat and what it costs?” she asked.

  “God forbid!” said Vincent.

  Vincent liked to write an Italian menu. “Risotto di Frutti di Mare,” wrote Vincent. “Costa di Manza al Vino Rosso.”

  “Well really!” said Cassie the first time she saw one of these menus. “Really!”

  “It isn’t real,” Mrs. Combie said hastily. “He only writes it.”

  “That’s silly,” said Cassie, but it was not silly. It was like a pianist exercising his fingers on a silent keyboard; it kept them in practice, and, with Lovejoy as an audience, it was as if the keyboard gave back a small sound.

  “What is Costa di Manza . . . ?” she would ask.

  “Rib of beef marinated in red wine.” And Vincent would explain it to her.

  “What is Zabaione?”

  “A sweet made of eggs and sugar and Marsala.”

  “Have you got Marsala?” asked Lovejoy, who was versed in the ways of the house.

  “Of course,” said Vincent. “Anything that keeps we have got.”