An Episode of Sparrows

by Rumer Godden

  “What will you do if they ask for the beef?” asked Lovejoy, troubled.

  “I shall say, as I put the menu down, ‘I’m sorry, the beef is all gone but the cutlets are very, very good.’ Cutlets are quick, you see,” said Vincent, “and if I say something is all gone, they will think we are popular.”

  The cutlets would be very, very good. Everything he served was good, even the ordinary dishes, the omelettes and steaks he cooked for the few customers he had; he dealt at the better-class shops in Mortimer Street off the High—Nichol the butcher’s, Fenwick and Lay the poulterer’s, and Driscoll the greengrocer’s, the best and most expensive in the district.

  “But there’s good stuff on the barrows,” said Mrs. Combie.

  “Stuff’s the right word for it,” said Vincent.

  He did not buy much, but every day he bought afresh, not only vegetables but meat or fish or poultry, and eggs and cream. “One day maybe we’ll have our own farm,” he told Mrs. Combie.

  “Our own farm?” asked Mrs. Combie faintly. When she was frightened her voice seemed to reel away, and her breast palpitated.

  “Why not?” said Vincent. “You don’t know, Ettie,” he would say, putting his arm round her shoulders, “you don’t know the money there is in this; and not only money,” he said, his voice solemn. “Men like Lombard and Romanos, and Vera, were famous all over the world. One day you may be proud, Ettie, of being married to Vincent.”

  “I am, George, I am,” said Mrs. Combie. She would not have had him think otherwise, but meanwhile—and she sighed. There was so much she did not understand, so much that seemed necessary. “I saw some lovely looking salami in the Stores in the High for one-and-two,” she told Vincent. “English salami.” But Vincent shuddered.

  “He only married you to get the restaurant,” Cassie told Mrs. Combie. “And because you’re soft.”

  “Yes, I married her because she’s soft,” said Vincent, and his eyes looked like an angry little dog’s. “She has a soft voice, which you haven’t. She feels soft.” And he put his arm round Mrs. Combie and squeezed her; over Mrs. Combie’s sallow, thin cheeks came her deep, pleased flush.

  •

  Lovejoy liked the restaurant, its quiet, and its good looks; good looks were the right word; the small mahogany cash desk, for instance, looked good, it was solid and its colour deep; the white damask cloths on the tables were so starched and white that they shone; they were laid with clean silver and glass, the napkins cocked; Vincent rolled them round his hand and tucked the ends in expertly in a second. There were specimen vases holding one or two flowers, roses, carnations, or camellias—Vincent picked them out himself. The light was rich and dim; there was electricity in the restaurant, though there was gas in the rest of the house. A brass shaded light stood on the desk, but in the centre of the ceiling was a chandelier of apricot-coloured stone. “Alabaster,” said Vincent reverently. He had bought it at a country-house sale.

  Lovejoy often looked at it; gilt babies, flying out from the alabaster centre bowl, held the lights, though the bowl itself glowed. The babies were naked and had wings; Lovejoy admired their round little limbs, complete even to gilt dimples and folds. “But they haven’t any stomach buttons,” she said, “no navels.”

  “They don’t need navels,” said Vincent. “They’re cherubs, supernatural babies.”

  “Supernatural?”

  “Things above, around, other than natural things,” said Vincent; and, seeing that Lovejoy looked bewildered, he said, “Things we don’t see.”

  “You mean not real?” asked the practical Lovejoy.

  “Perhaps more real than real,” said Vincent. “Things are more than just themselves.” When Vincent thought, Lovejoy noticed, his forehead stood out in lumps; it was a big forehead for such a little man.

  “No one knows, no one, what will come out of anything,” he said. “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” And Vincent looked away, far over Lovejoy’s head.

  Mrs. Combie did not like it when Vincent called her Horatio or Brutus or any name but hers, Ettie; it made her feel as if she were not there. Lovejoy, as one accustomed to the antics of grown-ups, accepted it, but now one word struck her. She felt in her pocket for the edge of the packet of seeds she had nearly thrown away.

  “Mr. Vincent,” she said, “what is good garden earth?”

  Strangely enough, Vincent could not answer this simple question.

  CHAPTER VI

  NO ONE knew when Mrs. Mason would appear in Catford Street; a postcard or a telegram would come, and next day she would arrive; once she had come without telling anyone. It might be at any time, but in March or early April she always came. “She comes to see me,” said Lovejoy, “before she goes where we’re booked for Easter.” Lovejoy still said “we.” “It might be any day now,” said Lovejoy.

  Mrs. Combie spring-cleaned the house, and Lovejoy helped her; last of all they turned out the Masons’ room, the first floor back. The walls were swept down, the linoleum scrubbed, the brown rugs washed, the fireplace black-leaded round the gas fire, the heavy curtains beaten and shaken, the armchair beaten too. On the armchair was a stain from some scent Mrs. Mason had spilled; the smell of it still lingered and when Lovejoy was more than usually lonely she pressed her nose against it and sniffed; as she sniffed she conjured up her mother. The brass rails of the big bed were polished; soon I won’t be sleeping in it alone, thought Lovejoy, and she thought of the big mound her mother would make in it, a lazy mound but warm and soft to be against.

  When everything in the room was clean, a fresh starched tablecloth was put on the table, a clean white honeycomb counterpane on the bed—Mrs. Combie did not know how fashionable those had become—and a white crocheted runner on the dressing-table, and it was ready. “Now don’t you dirty anything,” said Mrs. Combie. She said it as a matter of routine because Lovejoy was a child, but she knew Lovejoy would not dirty anything; far from it; the room would be dusted every day, the brass rubbed up, and Lovejoy would hardly dare to sleep in the bed for fear of rumpling it.

  Even in Catford Street there were signs of spring; spring sun shone on the pavements, windows were opened, and front doors were sometimes left wide; there was a strong smell of spring greens cooking, of soap and dampness from spring cleanings, of new paint. People bought bunches of primroses; they were only threepence a bunch on the barrows in the High, but the pale yellow of the flowers soon got sooty. The smoke from the chimney pots eddied this way and that as the breeze changed. Children, playing, left their coats open and they seemed to have a new energy; they played hopping games in squares and oblongs chalked on the pavement; they skipped—skipping ropes were suddenly fashionable this year—and some of the boys had scooters, painted scarlet. Cats lay out on the sills, and Mrs. Cleary’s and Miss Arnot’s cats had two litters of kittens. The birds were working, sparrows and starlings flying with wisps of straw and fluff and feathers to make into nests that no one ever saw. From the broken masonry of the Catholic church came a continuous soft deep coo, a pigeon brooding, and Father Lambert heard it as he went into his makeshift church below the aeroplane, which had not moved an inch. Young girls who had kept with other girls as if they were glued all winter, suddenly broke away and went with boys. Older girls announced their engagements; both Mr. Wix and Father Lambert had banns to announce.

  Lovejoy’s wardrobe was spring-cleaned too, at least as far as she was able; she let down the hem of her plaid coat, though it took her a long time; the hem looked a different colour from the other plaid but at least it was respectable; she cleaned the plimsolls with whitening, though she could guess what her mother would say when she saw them. “Never mind; she’ll buy me some shoes,” she said. She asked Mrs. Combie to wash her hair with her last remaining bit of green soap and brushed it for an extra five minutes every day, and every day she did her nails. “Anyone would think the queen was coming,” mocked Cassie. Then one afternoon Lovejoy came in from sc
hool and found a letter on the mat.

  Before she picked it up and turned it over she knew it was to say her mother was not coming. “She never writes, not a letter,” said Lovejoy, looking at the writing on the envelope. Slowly she carried it to Mrs. Combie.

  “Well, it’s nice to change your plans and let other people know,” said Cassie when Mrs. Combie had read the letter out. “I suppose you’ll go on looking after that child?”

  “She says they don’t finish till the tenth and then go to Clifton for Easter,” said Mrs. Combie, troubled. She appealed across the tea table to Vincent. “She says the time’s too short for the fare. Well, Scarborough is a long way,” said Mrs. Combie.

  “If I had a little girl,” said Vincent, “I’d come from John o’Groat’s to see her.”

  Lovejoy had retreated to the shadow of the stairs. Vincent had seen her standing out there in the side passage and had meant to show he sympathized, but when Lovejoy heard what he said she leaned her head against the banister knob and shut her eyes; she shut them tightly, but two small fierce tears came spurting out. Vincent saw the tears and turned his head away.

  In the four years since the Masons had come to Catford Street, Vincent had come to like and respect Lovejoy. Can one respect a child? Yes, one can, thought Vincent. Respect and like. “She’s as hard as nails,” Cassie said of Lovejoy; Vincent knew she was not.

  At first all that he had known of her was that Ettie’s new and abundant-looking lodger had a little girl of whom he caught glimpses when she passed the restaurant on an errand or on her way to school and back; a child in a plaid coat—“Yes, I had it even then,” said Lovejoy—so quiet he hardly noticed her; after a while he noticed the quietness. “Ettie, should a child be as silent and still as that?”

  Mrs. Combie had not thought about it. “She’s no trouble,” she said uncertainly.

  Vincent thought vaguely that a child ought to be a trouble. “There’s something wrong,” he said. Then one afternoon he had come out of the restaurant and found Lovejoy sitting on the stairs.

  It was three o’clock and the restaurant was closed; in any case there had been no one in for lunch and the kitchen was empty and tidy; this was the time Mrs. Combie did the washing or changed her slippers for shoes, took her purse and a black oilskin bag, and slipped out to the house shops while Vincent made up his accounts at the desk in the restaurant, wrote the evening menus, and perhaps dozed off in the quiet. It was uncommon for him to stir, but that day he had left an account book in his room and came out to fetch it. He had opened the glass door from the restaurant quietly and came lightly up the first flight of the stairs and along the landing to the second flight; there he almost stepped on Lovejoy.

  It was always twilight in that dark house, and Vincent had not seen much of her; there was only a glimmer of paleness from her hands and face, but he made out that she was sitting with her elbows on her knees, her chin on her hands; the way she sat was patient, patient and brooding. She looked small against the height of the stairs, and Vincent was moved in a way he was not usually moved with children. “Hello,” he said.

  She lifted her head and said, “Hello.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting.”

  “Is your mother out?”

  “No, she’s in.” And she went back to her waiting in a way that prohibited further talk. Vincent went on upstairs.

  He saw her there once again—on guard? thought Vincent. He knew there was a man there in the room and he knew that Lovejoy knew he had guessed it. “Who are these gentlemen who come and take your mother out?” he heard Cassie ask her.

  “Gentlemen,” said Lovejoy and walked away.

  “I believe they go into her room,” said Cassie.

  “That they don’t do.” Mrs. Combie flared up.

  “You don’t know,” said Cassie, “and Ettie, I think you don’t want to know.”

  Vincent opened his mouth to say, “It’s only twice,” then shut it. Was it only twice? thought Vincent. Still, even if they were in the room I don’t know they did anything wrong, he argued, and kept quiet, but he did not like it for the little girl. There were other things he did not like. Her mother sent her to the Crown; Vincent knew nothing about children, but he thought a child, especially a little girl, should not be sent even into an off-license. He watched Lovejoy more than he knew; when her mother went out, which was almost every night, Lovejoy waited up; she turned down the bed and put a glass of orange juice beside it, and waited. Sometimes Vincent was moved to take her a glass of hot milk. “You go to bed,” he said. “She’ll come.” Sometimes, if he were there, Lovejoy did go to bed, but Vincent knew that when Mrs. Mason came in she would make a noise, and laugh and flash on the light, while he had seen Lovejoy steal out of the room in the mornings with her shoes in her hand so that she would not wake her mother. “She’s not the one who is hard,” said Vincent.

  Now when Vincent had gone into the restaurant Lovejoy came and stood by Mrs. Combie. “I should only be half fare,” she said. “Couldn’t I go to Scarborough and see her?”

  “Dearie, she’s staying with a friend,” said Mrs. Combie.

  “Friend in trousers,” said Cassie.

  Lovejoy had turned away to the sink, where they had been peeling potatoes for the dinners. She picked up the potato knife and threw it at Cassie.

  “I couldn’t blame the child,” Mrs. Combie told Vincent. “Cassie shouldn’t have said that”; but, at the time, she did blame Lovejoy sharply and sent her to bed.

  Lovejoy lay in the double bed, trying not to look at the room, its immaculateness, its starched covers, the vase she had put ready for the left-over flowers from the restaurant tables; Vincent had promised them to her. She had had no tea and she was cold and presently she crept out of bed and fetched her coat and huddled it round her. As she lay, she let her fingers go over its warm wool roughness; it was familiar, friendly, her own, and mysteriously it made her heart a little less sore. Then her fingers met something stiff in the pocket; it was the packet of cornflowers.

  CHAPTER VII

  “WHAT does corn look like?” Lovejoy asked Vincent. “It says it has blue flowers but—” “Fair waved the golden corn,” they sang in the hymn at school. “The princess had corn-coloured hair,” said the stories; Lovejoy had seen pictures of corn, of course, but they were not anything like the flowers on the packet.

  “Corn hasn’t any flowers,” said Vincent.

  “But—”

  “It’s a grain,” said Vincent and he gave Lovejoy an explanation of how the seed grew and became wheat, “or rye, or barley or oats,” said Vincent, and was changed into bread. “Bread is the staff of life,” said Vincent, warming, “and it’s more than that. It can be spiritual as well as material. It’s a symbol.” Then he saw Lovejoy was not listening.

  “There are blue flowers on the packet, printed,” she was saying to herself, and the obstinate, closed look came on her face. “I shall plant them and find out.”

  But before even one seed can be planted there has to be earth.

  “What is good garden—?” she began, but she had asked Vincent that before. Vincent was quick to many things but he had forgotten about earth. It was not surprising; in Catford Street there was not a sign of earth, except in the bombed places; everything was man-made, “But under everything,” Tip was to argue, “under everything’s dirt.” Tip called earth “dirt.” “Under the houses and pavements and the road, there’s dirt.” That was true, and dirt, earth, has power, an astonishing power of life, of creating and sweetening; it can take anything, a body, an old tin, decay, rust, corruption, filth, and turn it into itself, and slowly make it life, green blades of grass and weeds. “These bombed sites,” said Angela, “according to the Ministry of Works, grow one hundred and thirty-seven different kinds of weeds. It’s amazing.”

  Olivia thought it was amazing too but not in Angela’s way; as when speaking of sparrows, they saw two different things; Angela thought of the weeds, Olivia
of the power of life.

  When Lovejoy thought about the cornflowers, the seeds, she seemed to forget a little, a very little, about her mother. “I need to plant them,” she might have said, but where? “Plant them in a box,” said Mrs. Combie absently when Lovejoy asked her.

  “I want a garden,” said Lovejoy. If she had wanted the moon or a diamond tiara it would have been as easy to get in Catford Street.

  There were, of course, back gardens to some of the Street houses; but they were dark, open cellars of gardens, spaces of dankness between sooty walls; coals were kept in them, handcarts and bicycles and mangles, washing was hung in them and they were full of bottles and tins. One or two had trees, but they were sooty, stunted trees that smelled of cat; Istanbul, for instance, thought every tree in the Street belonged to him. One back garden had a lilac bush, but it did not flower; even Lovejoy knew that nothing would be likely to flourish in those back yards, besides which each of them belonged to someone.

  It was queer to think of people in Catford Street owning gardens. Lovejoy had lived there all these years but she had not seen what she saw now, the flowers—but they must always have been there, thought Lovejoy.

  Now, in almost every window, she saw pots with plants growing in them; pots of red and pink flowers, of yellow ones, daffodils—she knew them—and hyacinths, as well as green things, ferns, palms, rubber plants; Sparkey’s mother grew fuchsias in her flat window. Mrs. Cleary and Miss Arnot were unpopular, their cats spoiled the window boxes; some houses had window boxes as high as the fourth floor; they had not the profuseness of the Square window boxes but they made patches of unexpected colour up the Street. In the area of one of the houses a whole vegetable garden grew in boxes. Well, you have to use something like boxes down there, thought Lovejoy, an area’s concrete all over. The plants, she had to admit, seemed to grow well in boxes. “What are those?” asked Lovejoy, peering down from the pavement and pointing to some small shiny-leaved plants.