by Jane Bailey
I loved this ‘whom’, even if I hated her tone. Only Celia used words like ‘whom’.
‘By Gracie,’ supplied Mo.
‘Gracie? Who on earth is she? How come Gracie gets to decide what you do all of a sudden?’
She was staring right at me, her little toffee plait draped over the top of the wall, and her rosy bottom lip so hurt it began to protrude slightly. I felt my resolve slipping away.
‘Well! Jolly well play with Gracie, then, if she’s so special. I don’t care!’ and her head disappeared.
I could hear my pulse in my head, pummelling me into action, but I felt powerless.
‘Stop her!’ cried Mo.
‘Come back!’ I yelled. ‘Celia! Please! Wait! It’s not like that! Celia!’
‘Celia!’ shouted Mo.
‘Celia!’ I shouted.
The dear head reappeared. It said nothing, and seemed to find something of interest to study on top of the wall. I had no idea what to say, but I didn’t want to feel again how I’d felt when that head of hers had vanished.
‘Celia … Gracie is my … mother. She made me promise not to come here again.’
Celia’s face sprang into action. ‘Why?’
I started to swing my coat on its tag, and looked at the buttonhole stitching for an answer.
‘Why?’ Celia was furious.
‘I can play here, it’s all right. It’s just … I can’t go in.’
‘I don’t think you’ve heard what I’ve just said: why? Why doesn’t your mother want you in our house, for heaven’s sake? Lord above, it’s not as if we’re beneath her!’
I swallowed. ‘Do you know her?’
‘Of course I don’t!’ Her voice was full of disdain. I hated it, and resolved to stop it, as if by appeasing her I could shut down a whole side of who she was that I didn’t want to see.
I glanced at Mo. She seemed to have lost her nerve, and was biting her nails under hunched shoulders.
‘Can we come over, then?’ I asked.
Celia sighed. ‘At last!’ She bobbed down from the wall and made her way to our secret entrance, where we stood to meet her.
I climbed the section of topless wall and leant back to take Mo’s hand.
‘Hang on! I didn’t say she could come, did I?’
‘I thought—’
Celia had that voice again, parched and cruel. She narrowed her eyes at me and said slowly and decisively, ‘One at a time.’
I stopped climbing, my elbow on top of the wall. ‘No.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘I’ll only come if Mo can come too.’
Celia’s face became very dark, and I was certain I’d gone too far. I was ready to take it all back. I was ready to renounce Mo if that was the only way to transform Celia back to the girl I adored. But Celia’s face changed suddenly, for no reason I could understand.
‘All right, then.’ She smiled, a little strenuously I thought, and beckoned us both down behind the yew trees.
16
‘We’ll have to be jolly careful. It’s a million times more dangerous with the two of you. If Mrs Bubb sees us she’ll tell Mother, and Mother will have forty fits if she finds out.’
We were following Celia across the lawn to the glasshouse. I watched her confident step, which seemed totally unlike any other girl I knew. It wasn’t the way she placed her feet – she was still untrained in deportment – but the way she held her spine: her head was very high and her behind very pushed out, as though she were in a constant state of alert, an animal ready to pounce.
‘If anyone sees us, you’ve just come to get your ball,’ she said to the hall ahead as we entered the house. ‘Now, follow me. I’ve something to show you.’
She turned and beckoned us upstairs, her eyes resting on Mo and drinking in the obvious adulation. Mo said nothing but kept looking round at things, utterly fascinated. For some reason this irritated me. I wanted her not to be there, despite my rigorous defence of her coming. I wished she would stop noticing things and nudging me. I wished she would be less awestruck. Her being there simply magnified my own vulgarity in the eyes of Celia, and I could feel my status as her special friend slipping away.
She led us to her bedroom, walked over to a vast wardrobe on the far wall and flung open the doors.
‘What do you think?’ She unhooked a few coat hangers and held up dresses for us to see. One was a dark green velvet shift with a scalloped white collar and cuffs, another was in a cream silky fabric with a bias cut and fashionable uneven hem. A third was in a beautiful blue printed cotton with gathered side panels.
‘They’re beautiful.’
‘Oh!’
We both stared at the dresses. She dropped them on the bed and dived back into the wardrobe for some more.
‘Go on‚’ she said, turning round. ‘Try them on.’
Mo gawped at me. I stared at Celia for help. ‘Oh … we couldn’t!’
Mo didn’t bother to look at me for approval. She already had her frock over her head and was reaching for the cream silk. The speed of her actions made me snatch at the green velvet, and before long we were both pacing up and down in front of Celia’s long mirror.
‘What a perfect fit‚’ said Celia, arms folded and smiling like a generous aunt. ‘I was afraid they might be a little small – they’re last year’s.’
Last year’s or not, they were more spectacular than anything we’d ever tried on before.
‘A perfect fit‚’ said Mo giving a twirl, although her little frame was quite clearly swamped in the yards of cloth.
Then came Celia’s moment of glory.
‘Take them,’ she said. ‘If you want.’
Mo and I stared down at our gorgeous dresses and then at Celia. ‘Take them?’
‘Take what you want.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Don’t be a couple of goofs. Take them.’
‘Oh, Celia‚’ marvelled Mo. ‘Oh, Joy – what will people say?’ She beamed at herself in the mirror, and I realized then that we could never wear them. Gracie and Mrs Mustoe would know straight away what we’d been up to, and even if Mrs Mustoe wasn’t averse to a bit of charity, I could never, ever risk Gracie knowing we’d been here.
‘I’m very sorry, Celia,’ I said solemnly, ‘but we can’t.’
‘Joy!’ Mo turned her ferociously wounded eyes on me. ‘What you bloody playing at?’
‘We can’t. Gracie’d kill me.’
‘Well, you bloody ent gunna stop me!’
Celia unfolded her arms and furrowed her brow.
‘What is all this nonsense about “Gracie”?’
I unbuttoned my beautiful dress, but she beckoned me over to the window, and I couldn’t resist the confidentiality of the gesture.
‘I think you’d better tell me what this is all about.’
I looked out of the window and swallowed hard. I too wanted the dress I was wearing, as much as Mo wanted hers, and when Celia continued silently unbuttoning it for me it was more than I could bear.
‘It’s Gracie. She made me promise never to come here again. I think it’s something to do with love.’
‘Love?’
‘I think she was in love with someone here once. A long time ago.’
Celia stopped unbuttoning, slipped the dress off my shoulders, and a little smile came to the corners of her mouth.
‘Someone who’s still here, then?’
‘I … suppose.’
I was down to my vest and a pair of knickers with the elastic knotted and reknotted on the outside.
‘Well … let’s see …’ She studied the view from the window, and, as if on cue, into it walked Mr Rollins. ‘It must be someone who’s been here a long time, don’t you think?’
I hugged my elbows awkwardly.
‘I s’pose. At least twenty years or so.’
She walked over to the bed and tossed my dress over to me. ‘There were a couple of stable hands ages ago – before we had the car. The horse
s have gone now, of course. Terribly messy creatures, that’s the beauty of cars: they’re so wonderfully clean.’
I put my dress on hurriedly, feeling suddenly more naked than I was. Mo was still wearing her cream affair and showed no signs of intending to take it off.
‘When did they leave?’ I asked, holding Mo’s own dress out to her. ‘And do you know what their names were?’
Celia still had that little curve on the edge of her lips, as though smiling at some inner joke. ‘Oh gosh! That’s a difficult one. I do just about remember them, so I might have been three or something. Lord knows what they were called, though. Ned or Ted or Sid or something.’
I didn’t like the way she was talking about them. If one of them had been Gracie’s lover then they should be shown more respect. And in any case, I had been doing some calculations in my head, and it all seemed pretty unlikely. ‘I don’t think it could be either of them.’
‘Why ever not? Mrs Bubb always says one of them was a first-rate looker.’
Mo chipped in: ‘Have you seen Gracie Burrows? She’s old!’
Steady on. I knew it was because she was grumpy with me about having to get changed, but I frowned sternly at her, and Celia, thankfully, did not answer her, but went to sit in the window seat and stretched her arms out to grip the ledge on either side of her.
‘Is she ugly now?’
‘No!’
‘How long ago was this love affair? Do we know?’
All the awkwardness of the clothes scene and Mo’s sullenness seemed to evaporate. In that one little ‘we’, Celia had suggested a complicity that had lacked any real substance before. Yes, she had offered us her beautiful clothes, but that could be seen as charity if you wanted to be horrible about it, and yes, she had shown me around the secret corners of her house while her mother was out, and she had let me play in her shed, and all sorts of friendly things, but now we were an item, she was uniting with us to solve a mystery – my mystery, and she was going to give up her precious, Celia-time to do it. If I had the impression that she hardly cared whether Mo was in on it or not, and even that Mo’s presence irritated her, I tried to brush such thoughts aside. She must have read my mind, because she suddenly addressed Mo whilst looking out of the window.
‘So, Maureen, do you think Gracie Burrows …’ (she said it emphatically, as if it were humorous or unusual – I couldn’t quite think why) ‘… could have been in love with our Mr Rollins?’
Mo looked at the back of Celia’s head and spoke to her plait: ‘Mr Rollins! But Mr Rollins is married. Sid and Walt go to our school.’
Celia turned slowly to look at us, her eyes wide and knowing. ‘Ah, but he wasn’t married twenty years ago, was he?’ Mo and I looked at each other uncomfortably. ‘I believe he’s worked here all his life, because his father was gardener before him.’
I wanted to be pleased for Celia, for her clever solution to the mystery, but I felt cheated by it. For one thing, if the mystery was solved, then we were no longer a team trying to solve it, and for another – far more importantly, I think – I found myself indignant at the suggestion of my dear Gracie with crusty-faced Mr Rollins. It wasn’t that he was too old for Gracie (in fact, he was probably in his late thirties, whilst Gracie was forty-six) or that he was a gardener, or even that he was the father of Sid who farted a lot in class and Walt who wiped his snot on the underside of my desk. It was more that I wanted the mystery to be romantic. I wanted it to continue, and I wanted to spend forever with Celia trying to unravel it.
I shrugged. ‘We haven’t shown Mo the rest of the house. Won’t your mother be back soon?’
Celia got up from the window seat and fetched an old canvas bag from the bottom of her wardrobe. Then she carefully folded the two dresses we had liked, the cream and the green ones, along with two more she chose at random. She put them carefully into the bag, and slung it on her shoulder like an explorer. ‘Follow me!’
We followed her, and to my delight we did a quick revisit of all the rooms she had shown me before. I lingered in James’s room, while she continued the tour with Mo.
There was something different about it this time, and I found myself unable to leave the room until I worked out what it was. I stood rooted, and looked about. The walls were still of the palest green, and the oar and the branch were still on the wall. The coverlet on the bed was untouched, and the cricket bat was leaning where it had leant before. I walked slowly around, as though if I disturbed the air, I might knock something off balance. I studied a row of coins leaning against a bookshelf: they were foreign mostly, and I didn’t recognize any of them. There was a cup full of feathers. I took one out and saw that it had been made into a perfectly carved quill. I examined its tip, and felt a wave of pleasure at its perfection. Replacing it, I saw a book of stamps, which I opened carefully. The pages were plastered in colour, each stamp carefully placed on its folded stamp paper so as to produce a rainbow effect, or a grouped colour pattern. There seemed to be squares of colour, circles, triangles, flowers. There was no indication whatsoever of any grouping according to country, and the titles at the top of each page, ‘People’s Republic of Mongolia’ or ‘British Commonwealth in Africa’, had been completely ignored. I closed the book and looked at the little bureau for the wagtail. But the picture had been replaced by another bird, this time a chaffinch. I caught my breath. Not only was it beautifully drawn, but since I had been here last, Celia’s brother must have been here and drawn it. I placed my hand on the chair and imagined him sitting there. It gave me an odd feeling. I could hear Celia calling to me from across the landing, but I wasn’t ready to finish my trespass. And just as I was about to go, I turned from the bureau, and as I did so I saw a pair of shoes on the far side of his bed. I approached them. They were large – much larger than I expected – and stood together but at a slight angle. Not ten to two, more twenty past eight. I bent down and knelt beside them. They were made of a very polished brown leather with an intricate inlaid pattern on the toe. I touched the inside leather: it was soft. I picked up the right shoe and smelt it: a delicious leathery smell fought with another pungent, overwhelming odour. I sniffed again. I looked inside: size eight. Of course, at fourteen he would be a grown man, but I hadn’t expected it. I inhaled again, and then again.
‘Joy! Wherever are you?’
I placed the shoe beside its partner and rose to my feet. Oh, what a thing is a pair of shoes! I stood there looking at them, as if they were the feet of a young man, the ends of his legs, the mysterious James who drew so carefully and stuck stamps too carelessly, and who played cricket and wore size eight shoes and smelt of man.
‘Oh, here you are! You like this room, don’t you?’
I smiled meekly. ‘It’s different.’
‘I’ll say it is. Thank goodness we’re not all as messy as James.’ Celia, buoyed up by Mo’s adulation, looked flushed and happy. ‘Come along, I’m going to show you both the living room. We’ve just got time, I should think.’
And so we saw the grand living room with its high ceiling and exotic plants on tall stands. We lapped up the drawing room and its funny furniture with curly wooden claws, we gasped at the chandeliers and gawped at the crystal, the doorknobs, the carpets, the electric light, the telephone. And then we scampered across the lawn, past the wretched lovelorn Mr Rollins with his rake, into the yew trees and over the wall, Mo clutching our canvas bag of delights.
‘Joy!’ whispered Celia, grabbing my arm as I got down last from the wall. ‘You will come again, won’t you?’
I looked desperately into her clear turquoise eyes, ‘I can’t – I don’t think I—’
‘I’ve got something important to tell you!’
I clambered down before Mo could notice. She was brushing the chalky stone off her frock and spitting on her scuffed shoes, and I didn’t think she’d heard.
We didn’t know what to do with the dresses. When we got back home we hid the bag deep in Gracie’s coalhole.
17
&nbs
p; We had other places to play which lent an air of grandeur to that summer.
Mr Mustoe worked at the Really Big House, Upton Manor. Although his hours were cut, he was almost Head Gardener, and given that the head gardener was bent double with arthritis and unable to kneel any more, Mr Mustoe felt certain he was heading for better things.
The key thing about Mr Mustoe’s job was that whenever the occupants were in London – which was most of the time – only a skeleton staff remained, and he would let us children roam free in the grounds.
We lorded it up, Mo, Tilly, George, Robert and myself. We played croquet on the lawns, lounged about in deckchairs and made ever more gruesome scarecrows in the vegetable gardens. Our exploits were made even more exciting by the terrifying prospect of meeting one of the fleshless skeleton staff.
Prompted by the abundance of roses and the packed flowerbeds, we held scent-making competitions. Mr Mustoe declared Robert the overall winner with a product named ‘Utter Pong’. It went without saying that we helped with the upkeep of the gardens by polishing off the raspberries, the strawberries and some of the gooseberries. We roamed freely in the conservatory and the potting sheds, and felt obliged to pilfer a few pots. Similarly, when we were allowed through the scullery to an indoor lavatory, we couldn’t stop ourselves – confronted with stacks of neatly cut soap and white laundered hand towels – from collecting a few. It wasn’t that we needed flowerpots, and heaven knows we generally avoided soap like mustard gas, but the fact that it was there, stacked up so neatly and abundantly, made it irresistible.
It wasn’t long after that, that Mr Mustoe was sacked from his position for stealing, and so was the poor girl who had been kept on to preserve the summer fruit. I felt terrible. Mr Mustoe would never make it to Head Gardener now, his dreams of bettering himself were all in tatters, and he and the girl were out of work just as a great Depression was descending. And it seemed to me that we had caused the great Depression ourselves and were entirely responsible for it. We had ruined the careers of two innocent people – as well as most of the population of Britain and America – for some bits of old soap and a few gobfuls of berries. The guilt of it hung over me for years, until Mo told me blithely one day that her father had been pilfering the silver tableware, and the servant girl had walked off with a string of real pearls.
