The Fledgeling

by Frances Faviell

  She was startled by Neil knocking on the door behind the bed and asking, ‘Can I come through?’

  ‘Must you?’ she asked distrustfully. She had thought him to be asleep.

  ‘Yes, I must.’

  ‘Oh well, come on then. Take care you don’t bump into anyone—especially that old Evans. He’s no fool although he’s not as sharp as Mrs. Danvers. Peep round the door first and see if the coast is clear.’

  He listened at her door, then slipping the latch up he closed it behind him and stood against the wall of the passage listening again. The lavatory was in the yard at the end of the passage. Just as he turned from the door the great bulk of Mrs. Danvers loomed across the hall blocking the end. She stood there with her great red mottled arms akimbo, her carroty hair pinned in curlers in rows across her head and her legs bare and obscene with huge varicose veins. Neil could not take his fascinated gaze from them. Not gone to work then today, Nonie?’ she said excitedly. Her tongue seemed too large for her mouth and her words were slurred and half swallowed. Caught, unable to retreat or advance for fear of arousing suspicion the boy mumbled something and tried to pass her. But a great mottled red hand grasped him by the elbow and pale pink-rimmed eyes peered up at him, ‘Your Gran’s not bad again is she? She answered me all right this morning. Of course, one day I know she won’t answer any more. . . .’

  ‘She’s all right,’ mumbled Neil, disgust at her obvious gloating over the prospect of death for his grandmother making him so angry that he tried again to brush past her.

  ‘Then what are you doing home? Not got the push have you?’

  ‘No. Got a cold,’ mumbled Neil wishing he had a handkerchief to hold to his nose.

  ‘Give it to your Granny I expect,’ she cackled hopefully. ‘Why how thin you’re getting, Nonie . . . nothing here at all . . .’ and she grabbed the jersey in the place where Nonie’s soft pointed breasts would be. ‘Well well. You could do with a bit of me!’ and she put both her red hands under the vast pendulous breasts bulging through the yellow openwork blouse. Bending his head and charging almost like a goat Neil managed to get past and slammed the door of the lavatory. Had he taken her in? She had dug her hands into his chest. She must have felt the absence of breasts. Had she done it purposely? Had she been listening at the door and knew perfectly well that he wore Nonie’s clothes?

  When he returned to his grandmother’s room she was trying to discourage old Mr. Evans from entering. . . . ‘No. No . . .’ she was repeating, ‘No. I don’t want anything at all today, Mr. Evans.’

  ‘Got a cold, has she? I heard her telling Mrs. Danvers. She ought not to go out there in the draught,’ he was saying as Neil tried to dislodge his arm from the doorway and get through without inviting him to enter. ‘Where’s all your pretty hair gone? Not cut it off have you? A woman without hair is a woman without beauty I always say. . . .’ His quavering voice rambled on long after Neil had shut the door. They heard his shuffling steps go down the passage and up the stairs.

  ‘He hasn’t gone to his own room, he’s gone into hers . . . they’re putting their heads together. . . .’ said his grandmother worriedly, ‘You would have to bump into her.’

  ‘She won’t do anything, will she? She’s too fat and lazy. . . .’ He could still feel her fingers pressing into his chest and he was terribly uneasy. His grandmother didn’t reassure him. ‘Don’t make any mistake about her. Fat people are not always good-natured. She’s spiteful and never misses an opportunity to make a bit. She’s a ghoul in spite of her size. And that old Evans remarking on your lack of hair. I don’t like it. Pull that lock out a bit more in front . . . here . . . let me do it.’ She pulled out the wisps of fair hair.

  ‘She wouldn’t do anything about me, would she?’

  ‘Only if she thought I’d pay her to hold her tongue . . .’ said the old woman with a sigh.

  ‘I wish I could get you away from here . . . it’s so dreary and dirty. You want to go back to the country, don’t you, Gran? I wish I could get you to a place with a little garden.’

  ‘You’re going to be on the run for years. No use you thinking about gardens—or me either for that matter,’ she said wearily. ‘And they’ll probably be listening at the door—you’d better get back in there for a bit.’ She was tired—the influence of the drugs still about her.

  CHAPTER IV

  THROUGH the two pots of geraniums, when the light was good, Mrs. Collins could see the piece of waste ground left from the bombing in the war. Tall willow weed and grass grew in profusion amongst the fallen masonry and stones. Most of the rubble had been cleared away—but now, more than ten years after the end of the war, there were still the ruins of some houses, an archway, odd walls, and the deep foundations of what had once been a block of flats. The barbed wire erected round the site did not prevent the children from playing there. They had taken it over as a playground, finding it far more exciting than the streets in which they lived, and watching them at play there had become more than a pastime for the old woman—it had become almost an obsession.

  She knew all the children by sight, and from watching them at their games she had learned to know all their characters. She knew that Sandy cheated, that the one they called Ludi was a bully, that they called the little negro boy Sambo and pulled his tight black curls but loved him. She knew that little fat Cissie wet her pants, that Emily with the flaxen hair was a nasty little girl who was always telling smutty secrets in corners, and that the sisters with long pigtails were quiet and shy, and that bright-faced Linda was the darling—the leader of them all.

  Linda was the only one of all the children who played on the bombed site who was known personally to Mrs. Collins. One afternoon, a few months previously, the ball with which Linda and her friends were playing had been thrown high across the street, right over the little fence and down the sloping piece of ground to the semi-basement on to which Mrs. Collins’ window opened; and after it, laughing, tumbling, bright as the sun itself had come Linda. She had picked up the ball, and because she was a child both alert and inquisitive she had noticed the geraniums and Smokey the cat who curled up on the sill between the two pots in the afternoon sun. She had stood on tip-toe to stroke Smokey and to see if the geraniums had any scent—and in doing so she had caught sight of the old woman lying in the bed. It had been one of Mrs. Collins’ bad days when she was not able to sit in the basket chair. Through the dingy pane the child had smiled and waved her hand, and as she ran up the few steps again she had turned back and blown a kiss to the old woman watching her.

  After that Linda had come again and again. The window just below the street level, with the geraniums and often Smokey curled up outside his mistress’ window, seemed to have some strange attraction for her as she would timidly peer in the window. One day she had tapped on the glass pane and had waited until Mrs. Collins had managed to get it open. The late afternoon sun had been streaming in—it only came to the dark little room just before it began sinking low in the heavens, and the child had found an empty box on which she climbed so that she could talk comfortably with her head and elbows on the window sill. She was a gay child, full of inconsequent chatter, bits of news about her playmates and neighbours. To the old woman, imprisoned now in the small dark room, alone all day, the child was like some bright gaily-plumaged bird from another warmer brighter world. In the brilliant colours in which her mother dressed her, and with her dark eyes and flashing smile, she was curiously exotic for these drab streets.

  Mrs. Collins’ own daughter, now in Australia, had been a large dull respectable girl, and her dead daughter, Agnes, had been ugly, with spectacles and teeth that protruded. Nona, her granddaughter, had been sweet, but quiet and rather cautious. This child, daring, full of adventure and fun, was the kind of little girl which every man and woman would have been glad to have been blessed with. Beautiful as a cherub with tangled deep gold curls and great wide-set dark eyes, she had a skin of dark tea-rose. There was something so vulnerable, so transient, in th
e bloom of the skin, the curve of the full little mouth and the dimples which creased her face delightfully, that she could not pass unnoticed anywhere. But it wasn’t the face, beautiful as it was, which held the old woman in thrall—it was the child herself.

  She had come into Mrs. Collins’ life as a brilliant butterfly unexpectedly comes through a window, and there had been an immediate understanding between the old woman and the child. Now scarcely a day passed when Linda did not come standing on tiptoes on the box to chatter to the sick woman. She brought her drawings from school, her maps, her needlework, the first daisies, the first chestnut buds from the old tree amongst the ruins; these and all her small childish treasures were brought for inspection and approval. If Mrs. Collins felt well they would play games—halma, or ludo, fighting out exciting contests to the finish. If it were wet, Linda would climb in the window and curl up on the end of the bed and they would tell each other stories. The child had a vivid imagination and her stories were a source of great amusement to Mrs. Collins.

  Linda was left alone all day, for her mother went out to work. A pretty woman with the same wide-set dark eyes and dark gold hair as Linda’s, she had not been married to the child’s father.

  ‘She’s a good child—never given me a moment’s trouble,’ she would say to Mrs. Collins, when the old woman praised Linda’s beauty and intelligence. Linda was almost ten; she had been born just after the end of the war. Her father had never seen her, having returned to America without knowing of her existence.

  ‘He had a wife and family back there in the States—he never deceived me about that. He was good to me, but I always knew it couldn’t last. If he had known about Linda he’d have done something—he loved kids,’ she had said disinterestedly when Mrs. Collins had asked about Linda’s father.

  ‘Do you ever hear from him?’

  ‘Christmas and on my birthday he sends a card.’

  ‘And you’ve never told him about Linda?’

  ‘No. He had children already. I knew that.’

  ‘What have you told the child?’

  ‘That her father was killed in the war.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s wrong. Her father should know about her. Any man would be proud to acknowledge a child like Linda.’

  She did not tell the mother that she did not like the way Linda was left to her own devices every day after school. What was the use? Hadn’t she herself been obliged to leave Nona and Neil in the same way when she had been out at work? But of course she had had Len. He had always been a rock of a boy. If he promised a thing he did it. Nothing could have lured Len from the straight path of duty. He had been the reverse of his father. He had been a grand boy. Several tears spilled from the old woman’s eyes at the thought of his untimely death—they rolled unheeded down her woollen jacket buttoned high and tight to the neck. On Len she had lavished all the affection which her own son Edward had thrust from him from an early age.

  Since Len’s death Linda had come to mean even more in Mrs. Collins’ life. She lived now for the afternoons when the little girl would come; and the short hour which they spent together was for the old woman the highlight of her monotonous dreary days. The child brought life, vivid pulsating life into the room. She always came with the sun—and with shouts and shrieks of laughter. She was already showing at ten the signs of a ripe and voluptuous beauty, with something so foreign and exotic in her that the old woman did not care to think of her playing in the streets so freely and crawling about in those ruins across the street—there were eyes in the drab neighbourhood which would soon become aware of her.

  ‘Was her father a good-looking man?’ she had asked the mother.

  ‘Wonderful looking. Blonde—and yet dark . . . Linda’s like him.’

  The house was very quiet now. Neil must have fallen asleep—there hadn’t been a sound since he had turned once or twice on the narrow cot. The clock from the nearest church struck ten. A sparrow came and perched on one of the geraniums. He was so near Smokey that she held her breath. Smokey had opened one eye. Years ago she had waited breathless for a sparrow to perch on her wrist in Regent’s Park—that had been when Jim had been courting her and had brought her on her first visit to London. Jim had been killed in the First World War. . . . She remarked the shining line of the sparrow, its quick grace, the sudden movement of Smokey—and it was gone.

  Shuffling steps sounded along the passage in the hall, a pause, a heavy breathing, then old Mr. Evans’ voice, ‘Mrs. Collins . . . Mrs. Collins . . . going out now . . . . Can I get anything for you? Any little bit of shopping?’

  ‘No, thank you, Mr. Evans. Nonie’ll go presently—she’ll be here today because of her cold and she’ll bring in all I want.’

  ‘It’s no trouble. No trouble at all. If you’ll just tell me what you want.’

  ‘Nothing, thank you,’ she said firmly. The old man would go on repeating his offer for some time. She was sorry for him—and often shut her eyes to the purposely-forgotten change—or to commodities for which he took the money and never brought her—but there were limits. One’s purse set a limit on compassion. She was herself too poor to be blind too often. All he wants is a few pence—when his miserable bit of pension is gone and he’s got to wait for next week’s he gets like this—always trying to squeeze a few pennies out of Mrs. Danvers or me. If I had no family I’d be driven to something similar.

  A boy went by whistling a tune from Kismet. A song they were for ever plugging now. Now, that’s started me off again, thought the old woman. I’ll have that tune running through my head all day.

  The radio stood on a cupboard by the bed. She had only to turn the switch. Nona wanted to get her the television—but she didn’t want it. They had quite enough to pay for, saving up for Australia. They wanted to pay their own fares so that they would be free to do as they liked about settling. She did not want the radio this morning—she wanted to think, about Neil. What had she done promising to assist in getting him away like that? She must have been mad. Nona had been so insistent, so desperate in her plea for her twin. She had looked quite distraught when she had threatened her grandmother. The old woman was powerless against this strong tie between the twins. It had always been like that—from early childhood. The two were wretched when separated. They never had been separated for more than a day or two because one could not bear to be parted from the other. During the war, when they had been evacuated to the country, they had inadvertently been sent to different families and both had been ill with misery. It had, as usual, been Len, placed in still another house, who had managed to get them accepted in a family willing to take them both.

  When Neil had been called up Nonie had been frantic, but all her protests and tears had been unavailing; Neil had been taken. For the first few weeks his twin had moped and fretted herself into a frenzy over him—and then the boy had suddenly turned up at home—had simply walked out because he couldn’t stick it, he had said. She could see now the scene when, having resisted all the girl’s desperate appeals to get her twin away, to hide him from the police—she had handed him over to them. She could see Nonie clinging, sobbing to the boy and the two embarrassed policemen having to remove her forcibly. Horrible! And the second time had been almost as bad. And of course the girl blamed her for not having helped her grandson. She had been bitter and resentful, saying that the old couldn’t understand the changing world and the new outlook of the young. They were all sick of war, of soldiering and the talk of bombs.

  The old woman sighed; she saw it all too well—but what could she do? The law remained unchanged—military service was obligatory, whatever those liable to be made to fight thought about it. It had been Len who had encouraged his friend Charlie Kent’s friendship with Nonie. Len had been wise beyond his years, had always carried the burden which his father had refused to accept. Len said that neither twin would be able to stand on their own feet until one of them had married. And Nonie and Charlie had been instantly and mutually attracted—just as she and Jim had bee
n. Only Neil, when he had been told by his brother of the forthcoming marriage had come rushing home again, as wild and desperate as Nonie had been this morning and had made another scene, shouting that Charlie Kent was too rough and insensitive for his twin, that Nonie could never be happy with him. Well, there it was. They were happy enough, planning to go out to her sister in Australia and loving each other when Charlie was not away on long runs. It was Neil who caused the rifts between them. She was positive that Charlie would refuse to help his young brother-in-law, that, like last time, he would insist that he be handed over to the Army authorities. And with Len dead it was no use denying that she herself felt differently about forcing the boy back. He was her only remaining support; for Nonie belonged to Charlie, and, frail as he was in character, Neil was devoted to his grandmother.

  From the street above came the sounds of the dustmen. The clatter of dustbins, the shouts of the men as the great dustcart halted outside each house for them. Down the steps came two lumbering figures. Up they went with the laden bins on their backs. When they returned with them empty, one of them tapped on the window—‘Hello, Ma! How be doing?’ She pulled herself up and, pushing open the window, smiled as the great dirty face grinned in at her. The second man turned back and waved too. ‘Cheerio, Ma! Chin up!’ he called.

  They never forgot her. Always knocked on the window or called out a greeting to her. One of their grins and quips was worth more than all the advice from the welfare worker or the doctor. When she watched them lumbering up the steps with the loaded dustbins on their backs, she would think with rage of her son Edward. He had never carried a thing in his life, except himself—and even that unwillingly.