A Pack of Lies

by Geraldine McCaughrean

Snatching hold of the girl’s white lawn smock, Grace wiped her inky nib on its ruffles before laying the pen neatly in its compartment and locking her escritoire with its little silver key. ‘Then you shall have to borrow the money from someone, won’t you, dear?’ she said sneeringly. And when Morgana had left the room, crying, Grace muttered, ‘Silly bastard,’ and ate some of the cake she had stolen from Belinda’s trunk.

  To her great vexation, Grace’s letter did not have the desired effect. Her mamma was suitably horrified to discover that she had placed her dearest daughter in such a den of wickedness. But instead of sending a liner ticket by return of post, she arranged for Grace to live with an elderly aunt in Knightsbridge, and advertised in The Times for a governess.

  This was a great deal worse than Kensington Preparatory School for the Daughters of the Empire. There was no-one to persecute, no-one to pay for her expensive little pleasures, no-one she could frighten into doing her schoolwork. The governess, Miss Starch, was a harmless enough woman with a round, homely face and a box of toffees in her desk drawer to give Grace if she were good. The box came out often, but regrettably Grace rarely deserved the toffees she was given. Being good was not Grace Briavel-Tomson’s chief ambition in life.

  Miss Starch was a Methodist and played the harmonium at the Methodist Chapel on Thursdays. Late at night, by the light of a spirit-lamp, she liked to write little songs of praise for her fellow-worshippers to sing. Miss Starch was flattered that Grace always wanted to see her hymns and to copy them out … but then she did not know how useful they were to Grace for her weekly letters to India:

  Dearest Mamma, I thought you might like to see a few lines I wrote this week. They just came into my head from nowhere. I hope you like the words. I am sorry I am not in India. Then you could hear the tune, as well.

  Grace’s mamma collected quite a treasury of verses in this way, and cherished them lovingly in a leather-bound book labelled, ‘Grade’s Poems’.

  Sometimes, a particularly handsome young Methodist would walk Miss Starch home from the Thursday service. It was seeing them stand together in the lamplight beneath Grace’s bedroom window which gave her the idea of how she still might get to India.

  Dearest Mamma and Papa,

  It is my v. painful duty to tell you that Miss Starch is not so respectable as she seems. Last night I saw her kissing the telegraph boy, and this morning she was holding hands with the baker. Aunt Gladys says Miss Starch is ‘carrying on’ with a Methodist, but I don’t know what that means. People say she writes coarse music-hall songs as well, for sixpence a time, but I don’t think this can be true, because she is always trying to borrow money from me. Do please let me come to India. I don’t like to be here with Miss Starch and Aunt Gladys - especially when Aunty is drinking the gin.

  This did the trick. Before the month was out, money was telegraphed from India to pay for a liner ticket to Bombay. Miss Starch was fired without notice, without explanation, and without references. Her young man broke off their engagement for fear of scandal touching the Methodist Chapel of Knightsbridge. Aunt Gladys was deeply hurt that none of her puzzled letters to India were answered: there was not so much as a Christmas card - only a small pamphlet all about the dangers of strong drink. This startled Aunt Gladys, who was a lifelong teetotaller.

  India sweltered under a sky the colour of bruises. The air was thick with flies. A rain of mosquitoes and blowflies beat into her face, and the light hurt her eyes. At night, the dark leaned on her as if exhausted by the heat, and the undergrowth hummed with the promise of huge, grotesque insects. It was true that there were servants and ayahs to do everything Grace told them. But Grace took an immediate dislike to her personal ayah.

  Raissa had hair so long, glossy, thick and beautiful, that she deserved to be hated. She was fabulously lovely, and looked so precisely like the princess in Grace’s favourite story-book, that Grace learned to hate the book as well.

  Raissa, like Miss Starch, was betrothed, but of this Grace was not envious. For the servant girl was promised to a sun-wizened little man who moved about the house on bare feet, as silent as villainy. Sometimes he seemed to be watching his betters with those liquid brown eyes … in fact, whenever Grace looked around. His name was Imrat, and he rode a green bicycle without a bell, whose brakes bound on the wheel rims with a strange shush-shush-shushing. It was a sound Grace came to associate with a shiver down her spine and a tightening in her throat.

  ‘When I was in England, I had six butlers and three personal maids and a carriage to take me anywhere I wanted to go,’ she told Raissa (to put her in her place).

  ‘When I was in England I had this also,’ said Raissa.

  ‘Oh! When were you ever in England?’ exclaimed Grace.

  ‘I was never in England, Missy Sahib,’ said Raissa, and slipped out of the room on her silent brown feet.

  Grace sent Raissa on the long walk into town almost every day to buy lengths of cloth in the bazaar. When Raissa brought the cloth, Grace would say, ‘That’s not the kind I meant at all.’ ‘I said red, not blue, you stupid girl. Take it back and get me my money! Now! This instant!’ But often, when Raissa had gone, Grace would hear the shush-shush-shushing of the green bicycle and knew that the girl was riding pillion down to the town, which spoiled the whole thing.

  ‘I believe I shall take you tiger-hunting and use you for bait,’ said Grace, hoping to frighten the girl, for she had heard that the natives were all stupid and gullible.

  ‘I fear there is a great shortage of tigers this season, Missy Sahib,’ said Raissa, bowing. ‘Rats there are in plenty, but they feed where they choose.’ And for a week, Grace’s dreams swarmed with big brown rats, and her imagination filled the darkness outside the bungalow with gnawing and squealing.

  Raissa must go. Grace quickly reached that conclusion. But she was patient, and waited her chance. The perfect opportunity came the evening after the Embassy Ball, when her mamma’s few items of jewellery were still lying where she had taken them off, not locked away in Papa’s deed-box.

  Grace looked around once, looked around twice, and swept the jewellery into her smock pocket. She would hide it in Raissa’s bedding when there was a chance to enter the servants’ quarters unseen. In the mean time, she hid the booty where she had once hidden the things she stole at school - in her beautiful escritoire.

  It was there when she went to sleep that night, sweltering under her mosquito net, pressing her fingers into her ears to block out the pitiless throb and whirr of the tropical night.

  Of course, as she slept, her hands fell away from her ears. She became aware, in the darkest hour before morning, of a soft shush-shush-shushing which brought her suddenly, unaccountably wide awake. The moon was bright. It silhouetted a host of winged insects crawling, crawling, crawling on the white mosquito net. They were just like the pictures she had seen of angels hovering over a death bed. Grace pulled the covers over her head and howled with rage that her parents should have brought her to this horrible, sweating country.

  In the morning, at breakfast, she waited for the dreadful news to break — that Mamma’s jewels had been stolen. Not a word was said. How very unobservant Mamma must be! She had not even missed her jewels. Grace hurried from the table at the end of the meal and went to her mamma’s bedroom. The jewels lay exactly as they had lain after the dance.

  Was she mad! Had she dreamt the whole brilliant plot and performed none of it? She ran to the escritoire. It was empty. The innocent pink stationery blushed up at her, ashamed.

  ‘You have not lost something, Missy Sahib?’ Raissa said, creeping into the room on her silent brown feet.

  ‘No! Go away! Get out!’ yelled the young English gentlewoman, stamping her feet in a tantrum.

  Next day, her mamma and papa went away to tour the province. Grace was left alone in the silent house which reeked so of flowers and sunlight and the servants’ meals of curry. She was speechless with resentment and boredom, and scuffed through the rooms, glowering at the ca
ged birds, the ivory statuettes, the sun-bleached magnificence of the carpets on the walls.

  How she longed to go walking in the rain amid the noise of horse-drawn cabs and the smell of soot and rainy newspapers, under the flicker of gas-lamps and a murky, English sky. Around her, the entire Indian subcontinent stretched out like an ocean on which she had been cast adrift. Instead of seagulls, there were vultures; and instead of fish there were lizards, and instead of sharks there were dark, sinister figures in crisp white clothes riding green bicycles with binding brakes …

  ‘Raissa come here!’ Her voice was so shrill that the caged macaw out on the verandah answered it with a shriek.

  Quick and smiling and eager to please, Raissa appeared from nowhere on her soft feet, the hair spilling from a half-wound plait like dark wine pouring down. She bowed with all the grace of a white crane, her palms pressed together as though she were holding a butterfly captive between them. ‘You called, Missy Sahib?’

  ‘Yes, Raissa. Why were you so long? Fetch me some big scissors.’

  The scissors came with no clattering of drawers or turning out of boxes.

  ‘Now sit down, girl. I’m going to cut your hair.’

  ‘No, Missy Sahib!’ The slim brown hands flew to the plait. ‘Why for?’

  ‘Because I would like a hairpiece made of it - and because if you don’t give it me I’ll find someone else to be my servant. While my papa and mamma are away, I am the mistress of this house. So sit down and let me cut off your hair!’

  Raissa looked to right and left, like a fawn scenting a tiger. ‘I go now to the town and buy you hair, Missy Sahib — plenty beautiful hair — much more beautifuller than mine.’

  Grace put a weary fracture into her voice. ‘Oh dear, Raissa, you are very vain. Didn’t you know, it’s a sin to be vain?’ Grace pounced. Her serving-girl, though she might have held out for justice at the hands of the master and mistress, though she might have forfeited her job rather than her hair, dared not fight hand-to-hand with an English gentlewoman. Besides, Grace was strong and well-practised in torment. She was armed, too, with a long pair of very sharp scissors.

  For her part, Grace, drunk on the adrenalin pumping through her brain, sobered a little when she felt the hair in her hand. There would be a price to pay when her parents returned. They were always saying that servants should be treated with respect, and they showed signs of being fond of Raissa. Sometimes Grace thought they showed Raissa more affection than her … All these things went through her head as she knotted her fist in the rope of black hair. And perhaps fear of the consequences made her hand waver, for she slashed the plait across half-way down its length, and left enough of the silken black to cover Raissa’s face as she broke free and fled from the room.

  There was something vile and half-alive about the hank of hair Grace was left holding. She ran to her escritoire and pushed the hair inside, under the tray. It left a smell on her hand of safflower oil, that would not come off with washing.

  That night, the crickets and toads roared round the house like a migraine, and the moonlight plastered it with sweat, and the flickering shadows of bats flecked the moonbeams as thickly as motes in sunshine. Fireflies were setting a slow fuse to the world, and when it burned right down, there would come an explosion of Papa’s anger. Grace lay awake, trying to think of a lie that would get her out of trouble.

  ‘I know! I found Raissa stealing one of my dresses and cut off her hair as a punishment. They’ll take my word against hers! They’re bound to!’ Grace allowed her backbone to relax into the mattress and the darkness to reach up for her …

  She must have dozed for a few moments, for she dreamt she heard a mechanical shush-shush-shushing and the ping ping ping of a broken spoke against a mudguard. She sprang awake, her scalp prickling with unease.

  Perhaps a letter to her parents might be a wise precaution. Otherwise Raissa’s clever tongue might win Papa round before Grace had a chance to banish the girl from their affections. Yes, a letter. Perhaps then Papa would write, dismissing the girl, and it would never come down to Raissa’s word against hers. ‘How fine a thing is a good education,’ thought Grace, slipping out of bed. ‘I doubt if that girl can even write her own name, let alone write letters like mine!’ And she lit a lamp which drove the darkness away to a safer distance.

  Through the house she went, waking the macaw and the monkey with the light, but no-one else. The whining of insects seemed to beat against the house and make it tremble, but after all, it was only the flicker of the lamplight that made everything quake. She composed in her head as she went.

  Dear Mamma and Papa,

  Do send word that that dreadful girl Raissa be dismissed. This morning I found her wearing one of my dresses … and cutting her hair with my needlework scissors! When I remonstrated with her, she said ‘I’m as good as you any day’ and wanted me to curl her hair to look like me. I think she is only behaving like this because you are away, but oh, dear, precious Mamma, I simply don’t know how to handle servants, and she does frighten me so with that little penknife of hers. Darling Papa! Did you know that her betrothed - the man called Imrat - is a Nationalist and wants to ‘wash the English out of India on a tide of blood’? Such people! Do please write and advise me what must be done. I am so very alone without my dear Mamma and Papa …

  Flushed with the thrill of inspiration, she pulled her escritoire to the edge of the table, drew up a chair, opened the lid, and lifted out the tray of pens. As she reached in for the paper, something soft and cold curled around her wrist and gave her a fright. Then she laughed at her foolishness. ‘Of course! Raissa’s plait!’ She drew out the pink stationery and shook her arm to dislodge the rope of hair.

  But it would not shake off. In fact it clung tighter, taking another turn and another around her forearm, the bulbous end searching up inside the sleeve of her nightdress …

  Until the snake struck, Grace was still convinced that the blackness round her arm was nothing more than a hairpiece cold with safflower oil. Afterwards, she just had time to hear — beyond the cackle of the macaw and the jibbering of the monkey and the migraine roar of the Indian night - the shush-shush-shushing of brakes binding, as a bicycle rode away across the lawns. Then the poison stopped her pulse - for a vein runs direct from the right hand to the heart.

  ***

  By this time, the pavement outside the shop was full of forlorn, irritable people, craning their necks this way and that for the owner of the empty newsagent’s. They clutched large Sunday newspapers and palms full of coins. Mr Singh left at the run to serve them, but returned ten minutes later, carrying a black tin cash-box.

  ‘If you would be so good, I should like to buy the delightful wooden writing box, Mrs Povey. And there was a book also that I saw … a book about India and the days of the British rule.’ (It was the book MCC had had propped open on the handlebars, and he fetched it instantly.)

  ‘Oh Mr Singh, I couldn’t …’ said Mrs Povey.

  MCC held out the box and the book, and the newsagent’s arms closed around them as the arms of India once closed around her sweet Independence.

  ‘But the box has no key!’ said Mrs Povey sadly.

  Mr Singh hugged it closer to his chest.

  ‘Oh but Mr Singh, it’s Sunday and I shouldn’t …’

  Ailsa crossed to the mantelpiece behind Mr Singh and held up the red electricity bill behind his shoulder so that it was in plain view of her mother.

  ‘Well, if you’d really like it, I’m sure Mr Berkshire can tell you how much it’s worth.’

  MCC took the electricity bill out of Ailsa’s hands and read off it unhesitatingly, ‘Forty-three pounds thirty pence, including VAT.’

  As the shop door was pulled to behind Mr Singh, Ailsa said to MCC Berkshire, ‘How did you know the combination on Mr Singh’s bicycle padlock?’

  ‘Guessed it,’ said MCC unswervingly, as he tossed the pith helmet on to a hat-stand.

  ‘You must have done.’

 
And there she left it. For, after all, there was no other explanation.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE PLATE:

  A QUESTION OF VALUES

  Of the hundred pounds nothing remained. Other larger purchases MCC Berkshire had made at the car boot sale and flea market arrived later in the day: a set of bookshelves and a stuffed salmon in a glass case. The little shop seemed to groan at the prospect of swallowing yet more indigestible junk, and if it had not been for the sale of the clock, the bookshelves would never have found a piece of wall to lean their backs against.

  Mrs Povey said to her daughter, ‘Maybe he’s right to open up the book side of the business.’

  But when a teacher from Ailsa’s school came in one day and thumbed his way through the fiction, he was brought gradually to a halt and a shiver by the feeling that someone was watching him. He looked up, and found MCC Berkshire standing a word’s length away from him, scowling. The teacher rummaged for his wallet. But MCC said, ‘I haven’t read those yet,’ and prised the books out of the customer’s hand. ‘I’ve been saving the fiction, you see.’

  ‘Ah! Quite!’ exclaimed the teacher, and turned tail and fled, casting a look of bewildered pity at Ailsa and Mrs Povey. (The word got about school after that, that Ailsa had a strange, deranged brother at home and that he was the reason the shop was in such dire financial trouble.)

  ‘That’s how to sell a thing,’ said Ailsa sarcastically, when her teacher was gone. Then Berkshire looked down at the books cradled against his stomach and stroked the spines with his fingers and seemed too ashamed to speak. And Ailsa wished she had kept silent, and wondered what had possessed her to be so rude. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Books don’t pay enough to make any difference. They’re not worth anything. Mum sells them for pennies, second-hand books.’

  ‘Some are worth hundreds!’ said MCC, perking up.