The Gipsy's Baby

by Rosamond Lehmann

  Mr. Carmichael stepped forward to face an audience reeling on the verge of anarchy. Alarmed, overheated and exhausted, the infants gave tongue. The mothers rocked them violently or charged for the exit. The toddlers and junior scholars stood on benches wrestling and aiming catapults. In the school-leaving age-groups cramming the back rows, vulgar behaviour between the sexes developed. Mr. Carmichael held up his hand, and in the benign authoritative tones proper to the C.O. of the local Home Guard made his announcement.

  John sprang forward to hiss into his ear:

  ‘Tell them Roger’s going to lead the community singing on his—your—the violin.’

  Concealing surprise, Mr. Carmichael broadcast this message. John suddenly vanished.

  ‘Mummy,’ Jane tugged at her arm and drew her down. ‘Do you like Mr. Carmichael?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘I suppose he’s all right.’

  ‘Let’s go out in front and hear Roger play.’

  ‘Good heavens, what are you thinking of? I can’t be seen like this. Besides, John’s given me orders to stand by the ropes while he gets ready’

  Mrs. Ritchie went out in front in time to see Roger Wickham part the curtains and take his place in front of them, faintly smiling, carrying a violin and a bow. The sight of him surprised the children into silence. He stood looking amused, diffident and confident, mysterious and romantic; and sounds of tender ejaculation rose immediately among the matrons in the body of the hall. Pointing his bow at the children, he said:

  ‘I’ll play something for you first. What do you want me to play?’

  ‘Roll out the barrel,’ squeaked a little girl.

  ‘O.K. Mind you all sing at the top of your lungs.’

  They didn’t trust him yet, nor yet the thing he was lifting and tucking under his chin and laying the stick across. But next moment he’d got it working brisk and clear, the right tune, too, and they started to sing, and sang at the tops of their lungs, while he nodded to them and smiled.

  ‘Good for you. What would you like next?’

  Volleys of demands came up at him. Unperturbed, he gave them Kiss me good-night, Sargeant-Major; Little Brown Jug; Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree. A girl at the back called for Lily Marlene; then Rosalie; then Marezy Doates; then Wish me Luck. Mr. Croft, retired constable, suggested Coming round the Mountain. He played every thing. He teased them, joked with them, apologised to, encouraged them, while the collecting-boxes went round and the coins clinked.

  Suddenly an elderly female voice called:

  ‘Why don’t you give the old ones a chance?’

  It was Mrs. Groner. A dark wave of colour raced over her face and neck and she looked down, glaring at her lap. She was a shy woman, and many disappointments and bereavements had all but sealed her lips. More genially, two or three of her contemporaries took up the cry. Some of the old-fashioned tunes.

  ‘What would you like?’ He coaxed Mrs. Groner.

  Reluctant, defiant, she said after a silence:

  ‘Can’t you give us Annie Laurie?’

  ‘I’ll try. If I forget it you must help me out.’

  He waited, concentrating, for a moment or two, then lifted his bow. The line of the air soared and sank, effortless, true, sweet and mournful. He could play, he could certainly most agreeably play tunes on the violin. At first they listened, but when he came to the end of the air, raised his eyebrows, smiled and began it again, they started to join in. Husky, unpractised, droning and wailing voices, they all sang Annie Laurie. The young ones sat dumb. Mrs. Groner wiped her eyes. Old Arthur leaned forward, cupping an ear.

  ‘Bless ’im!’ said Mrs. Fuller, weeping freely, to Mrs. Ritchie, who had slipped into a temporarily vacant seat beside her. ‘Can’t ’e bring it out beautiful? Oh, ’e’s lovely. You can see ’e’s a rascal, too, by ’is eyes.’

  ‘He’s a wonderful boy.’

  He caught sight of her from the platform and gave her a smile. He looked a little excited now, and very happy.

  ‘Do you think ’e’d give us Barbara Allen?’ said Mrs. Fuller. ‘It was my mother’s favourite.’

  She called: ‘Barbara Allen!’ But he did not know it.

  ‘I’m very very sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Never mind, sir,’ called Mrs. Fuller, loving, for fear he should fret.

  The new shepherd, a handsome giant of a man, far from his native Scotland, got up and asked with courteous dignity for Loch Lomond. Roger played it, but though a few tried they could not call the words to mind, and in the end the shepherd stood up and sang it solo. Me and my true love will never meet again, he sang out, uninhibited, in a deep, musical baritone, By the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond … Mrs. Ritchie had dissolved in tears.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Roger. ‘You ought to be on this platform, not me.’

  Greeting this as a fresh sally of wit, the youth at the back relieved the awkwardness of emotional tension by bursting into laughter.

  ‘No, no, I mean it,’ said Roger earnestly.

  He means it, he means it, repeated Mrs. Ritchie to herself, feeling thoroughly overwrought, turning round in her chair as if to reassure the shepherd. But the shepherd looked perfectly impervious to wounds or proffered balms. He had enjoyed singing and had now sat down again, easing his vast shoulders and stuffing his pipe with deliberation. Her eyes travelled on and lit on Mrs. Plumley, in toque and fur stole. Larger than life-size to her blurred vision, split from ear to ear, Mrs. Plumley’s face shone upwards upon Roger in a trance of ecstatic intimacy. Her denture appeared to have broken loose and to be gleaming by itself about an inch in front of its moorings.

  From behind the curtains came a threefold buzz. Familiar with the sound through a week of experimental testing, she recognised it for John’s portable electric bell.

  ‘That’s my warning,’ said Roger. ‘Lucky for me. I only know one more tune, and that’s The Londonderry Air. Shall I play it?’

  The desperate faces of Jane and Meg bobbed round the piece of material screening the wings, and she slipped from her place and sped towards them.

  ‘I couldn’t think where you were,’ said Jane. ‘I hope to goodness nobody saw me peeping.’

  ‘Mummy’s gone home to get the party ready,’ said Meg.

  ‘And Daddy’s counting the collection. I’ve got a feeling I’ve forgotten my part.’

  ‘I’m shivering with nerves,’ said Jane. Her hand was clammy.

  ‘Everything’s all right. You both know your parts perfectly and you look sweet. Remember to speak up.’

  ‘Hark at them clapping Roger,’ said Jane. ‘They won’t clap us like that.’

  Roger stepped down on to the sugar-box, smiled at them, said: ‘Good luck,’ and went to take up his position as deputy curtain-puller. Jane’s face relaxed for a moment as he passed, then froze again.

  ‘Mummy, remember where I told you to stand. When I have to jump back to the side when the lights go out and the face comes at the window. I shall put out my hand behind me to see if you’re there, and mind you take it.’

  ‘All ready!’ John leaped from the stage, balancing his calm on a knife-edge. He thrust the typed-out prompt copy into her hands, said to the little girls: ‘Get on up and take your places’; to Roger: ‘When I shine my torch three times, pull’; and vanished.

  The curtain went up on the last item—The Haunted House, a Mystery, written and produced by Gerald and Oliver Carmichael and John Ritchie. Played by Meg Carmichael, Jane Ritchie, Gerald and Oliver Carmichael. Crashes, knockings, groans, moans, strange lights, ghostly apparitions and other mysterious effects by John Ritchie.

  4

  It took some time to remove the green substance, a paste of his own invention, from John’s face. Lit by an arrangement of electric bulb, flex, and battery hung about his person, it had given blood-curdling effect to his recent
impersonation of a corpse behind the curtain. After the application of an entire pot of vaseline, it still adhered to his cheeks in scabrous patches. Brushing his mother’s hovering hand away, he tore them off at last, skin and all, presented a distressingly raw and inflamed appearance, and gave off a powerful smell of plasticene and gum fixative.

  ‘Hurry, hurry!’ said Jane. ‘We’re missing some of the party. Everybody else has gone on.’

  ‘Do you want me to take off your make-up?’ said Mrs. Ritchie.

  ‘No, leave her alone,’ said John. ‘She looks quite decent for once.’

  Jane’s flawless mannequin mask incongruously surmounted the high plain neck-line, the ungarnished bodice and box-pleated skirt of her best pink silk uniform frock. At this brother’s tribute, the eyes in the mask dilated in a wild flash and roll of gratification.

  Plunging into his jacket, John added: ‘Why can’t she always make up?’

  ‘Ten seems a bit young.’

  ‘Meg says girls not much older than her do in America,’ said Jane. ‘Even at school. Miss Potts would simply die if she heard such a thing.’

  ‘Come on,’ said John. ‘God, I’m hungry. Leave everything. Gerald and me are going to clear up to-morrow. May as well take this, though …’

  He buzzed his portable electric bell a couple of times, pocketed it, lingered a moment by the switchboard to touch it with loving fingers, and followed his womenfolk into the auditorium. Not an urchin remained in the hall, not one member of the local Dogs’ Group prowled stiff-stepping in neurotic umbrage round the entrance. Not one footstep in the lane. The entire community so lately bursting the pitch-pine ark had vanished and, leaving behind a shroud of complex exhalations, become embedded in the soundless night. Features of heroes, calls to patriotic spending blazed and trumpeted at no one from the posters. The multicoloured paper banner executed by the school children and tacked to the middle beam cried Salute the Soldier! into empty space.

  They switched off the last lights, locked the door behind them, and were out in the dark.

  ‘Walk on slowly,’ said John. ‘I must just collect my bike.’

  Hand in hand, Jane and her mother sauntered down the lane in the direction of the Carmichaels’ house. On either side of them, the hawthorn hedges condensed the thick of night in their long slumbering palisades.

  ‘I should almost like to go for a long walk in the dark with you,’ said Jane. ‘Yet I want to get to the party. I know what there’s going to be: ice-cream. Yet I keep thinking once the party starts we’re getting nearer to the end of it. Then what shall we have to look forward to?’

  ‘There’s the sports next week.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I forgot. But I’m afraid Roger won’t be able to stay for them. He’s going to start painting me and Meg properly at eleven o’clock to-morrow. Do you think I’d better keep my make-up on?’

  ‘I think not, on the whole. Painters often prefer ordinary skin colour for girls.’

  ‘But he may not be that kind. He may think—you know—you heard what John said … Will you ask him?’

  ‘I’ll ask him … What can that boy be doing? Is he making a bicycle? We’d better wait here for him.’

  Emerging from the lane at the cross-roads, they halted by the edge of the triangle of rough grass called Four Points Green. Here the country expanded wide and full. After all, it was not dark. They could see the ghost roads raying out into far spaces of downland and valley, the shapes of horses in a nearby field, the five elms at the field’s edge posturing dramatically like giants distraught. Overhead an amorphous patch of clouded incandescence showed the place of the obscured moon. An even lucent greyness suffused the air.

  ‘The moon looks like a junket,’ said Jane, staring upwards, ‘when we’ve all had some, and there’s only shreds and watery stuff in the bowl.’ She sighed. ‘I suppose Mr. Carmichael isn’t bad really?’

  ‘What’s on your mind about him?’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t seem very kind to Gerald and Oliver. Ordering the curtain down on them. After all, they were doing their best.’

  ‘But he wasn’t angry with them. They weren’t a bit upset.’

  ‘Was it joking?’

  ‘Yes. He just thought they were getting a bit rough.’

  ‘I see. But he might have said: “Well done, boys, you made everybody laugh,” or something like that. Still, Meg says he’s all right when you get to understand his ways.’ She put an arm round Mrs. Ritchie’s waist. ‘I’m glad I don’t have to understand your ways.’

  A series of muffled buzzes warned them of John’s approach.

  ‘Where’s your bicycle?’ said Mrs. Ritchie.

  ‘Stolen.’

  ‘Stolen! Where did you leave it?’

  ‘Round by the back of the hut, I suppose, or in front. I don’t know. I’ve hunted everywhere.’

  ‘Round by the … where anybody could … How could you be so careless?’

  ‘Heaven knows I had enough to think of,’ he said, bitter, ‘without remembering to padlock my bike to my person. Well, come on. There’s nothing to be done about it. I can always borrow yours. May the thief find my saddle even more filthily uncomfortable than I did.’

  He started to walk on, his shoulders hunched. Respectively worsted in a telephone engagement with Redbury Chief Constable, printing a neat notice in coloured chalks (four different colours for L O S T) to put in Mr. MacBean’s window, in silence his mother and his sister followed him.

  Suddenly Jane said:

  ‘You never had it!’

  ‘Never had what?’

  ‘Your bike. Don’t you remember?—you had to walk because of the suitcase with the properties in. You left it at the Carmichaels’.’

  ‘So I did. Why on earth couldn’t you say so before? All this flap for nothing.’ He let out an eldritch whoop, and in a spirit of encouragement caught his mother a whack across the shoulders. ‘Poor old Ma. Saved again. Cheer up.’

  They struck into Mr. Carmichael’s top pasture and started across the blanched insubstantial expanse towards the house.

  ‘Well, it’s over. We’ve won through,’ said Mrs. Ritchie. ‘Really, I do congratulate you. Your sketch went with a bang. Acting honours definitely go to you.’

  ‘Mrs. Fuller enjoyed it, I’m pretty sure,’ said Jane.

  ‘I think everybody did,’ said Mrs. Ritchie.

  ‘Mrs. Fuller showed it most. She kept calling out. Mrs. Groner didn’t show it at all. Nor did old Arthur—but I don’t suppose he heard. Did Mrs. Plumley show it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She never stopped laughing.’

  ‘Even in the frightening parts?’

  ‘There weren’t any,’ said John. ‘It was one stupendous sidesplitting farce from beginning to end.’

  ‘She laughed in Roger’s violin-playing,’ said John. ‘Some of it wasn’t meant to be funny. I hope he didn’t see her.’

  ‘She laughed out of love for him,’ said Mrs. Ritchie. ‘You know how she does.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Like she laughs at the hens.’

  ‘Or you,’ said John.

  ‘Is that it?’ said Jane. ‘I’ve often wondered why she laughs when I go into the kitchen. Mummy, did the clapping sound loud after our sketch?’

  ‘Very loud.’

  ‘I didn’t seem to hear any. You got a lot of clapping, Mummy. I think you got most. At least—after Roger.’

  ‘You put up a jolly good effort,’ said John. ‘But Audrey was ghastly. She simply missed the whole point.’

  ‘That wasn’t her fault. The only point was the spectacle of me and Mrs. Carmichael teamed up as a couple of young ladies. Who thought of Audrey? Who rushed off without a word to fetch her?’

  ‘And she didn’t forget any of her part,’ said Jane. ‘At least she only got a few words wrong.’

  ‘She can’t act for toffee,’ said J
ohn.

  ‘She thinks she can,’ said Jane, surprised at this verdict.

  ‘She would,’ said John. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised to hear she’s got her Girl Guides’ badge for Dramatic Proficiency.’

  ‘Do you think she has?’ said Jane.

  ‘She did rather seem to feel she was being a good influence,’ said Mrs. Ritchie. ‘If I’d dried up, I think I could have counted on her to say Bad luck!—audibly.’

  John uttered a brief hoot of laughter.

  ‘John loathes her,’ said Jane. ‘Don’t you, John? He calls her Fatima. Behind her back, of course. I think she’s very kind. It’s kind to say Bad luck. And she mended my white party socks. She told me she’s used to children, because she’s got a little brother.’

  ‘Oh, well, she came in useful,’ said John. ‘We’ll give her three rousing British cheers to-morrow when she pedals away.’

  ‘If she pedals away. I have an impression she feels there is much still to be done among us. I warn you: I will not endure any more helpfulness from anyone.’

  ‘I’ll deal with her,’ said John. He gave his sister a nudge and said imploringly: ‘Don’t say it, don’t. Keep it back. Just this once.’

  ‘How do you know what I was going to say? … Anyway, I did think it was’—she added in a mutter—‘right to be helpful.’

  John threw back his head with a light howl.

  ‘So it is,’ said Mrs. Ritchie. ‘Don’t tease her, John.’

  ‘She’s rather greedy, I must say,’ said Jane, plumping at the last moment for the nasty spirit of the thing. ‘Did you notice the helps of honey she took at tea?’

  ‘The conjurer!’ said Mrs. Ritchie quickly, ‘I clean forgot about the conjurer. I was too busy to watch him. What was he like?’

  ‘He was absolute hell,’ said John. ‘About ninety-eight, and a line of patter out of the Ark.’

  ‘He was rather rude,’ said Jane, prim.

  ‘Rude?’

  ‘Well, he got Cissie Hoddinott up on the platform and tried to make her shake hands with his—with Jack.’

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘His beastly doll,’ said John.