My American

by Stella Gibbons

  But she was no longer such a coward as when her mother was alive: she knew that, and when she lay in bed at night in the dark, talking to her mother, she would tell her what brave thing she had done that day. Mother, I touched the wheel of a motor bus while I was waiting to cross. I waited in Sainsbury’s for the butter and looked at the cut-up rabbits for ever so long and I didn’t feel sick. Mother, you are pleased, aren’t you? I do remember what you said about being brave. I’m not really afraid of anything now, except Dad when he’s had a drop too much and Mrs. Beeding reading The Wolf of Leningrad. I can’t bear to think of anyone reading it except you. Please, please, God, let me dream about Mother. Amen.

  On the evenings when she did not feel like writing, she would bring out the cardboard box in which she collected her pictures and sort them into two heaps, one for pasting up in her bedroom and one for cutting out, and spend the evening cutting out paper figures.

  Sometimes she flew cut-outs out of her bedroom window on long pieces of cotton. It was exciting to murmur a story about some lovely girl from the cover of a fashion paper, as she fluttered near the branch of a tree, and when she was hopelessly tangled there to send her lover out on another piece of cotton to rescue her. He usually lost his life in the attempt, either getting torn in half when Amy tried to pull him free of the branch or else fluttering away on the night wind when the cotton snapped. Far, far over the dim gardens lit by the faint autumn moon he would sail, and Amy, leaning out of the window to watch his flight, would murmur the story to a close:

  “In a remote corner of the savage jungle, far from the civilizing influence of the white man, a lonely figure haunts the glades. None of the wondering cannibals know his name or his history. His leg is shackled with a huge rope. It is Buck Finch, who gave up his heritage as a white man for love. Will he ever return? Who knows … who knows?”

  Then she would draw her head in and shut the window. The room seemed very bright and cosy after the dimness and scudding silver clouds outside, and she felt hungry, so she would eat a slice of bread and treacle while turning over the contents of another box neatly labelled “Curios.”

  There was a sprig of white coral wrapped in a paper inscribed “White coral from Capri (Italy). Given to A. Lee, 12 Highbury Walk, Highbury, London, England, Europe, The World, Space, by Mr. X, a friend of her father, T. Lee (Mr. X’s name is unfortunately forgotten as A. Lee was only eight years of age at the time the coral was given).” The box also contained a green jade heart labelled “Jade heart from New Zealand. Bought for the sum of £2,000 (twopence) from a tray outside a second-hand shop in Holloway Road. The vendor told A. Lee that it came from New Zealand.”

  And into this box she had put the coin given her by the American boy outside Kenwood House on her birthday, wrapped in a paper on which she had written:

  “American coin given to A. Lee as a birthday present by Robert Somebody, an American boy from Vine Falls, Paul County, New Leicester, America, on the said A. Lee’s twelfth birthday, October 31st, 1928.”

  She was still not quite sure whether he had given it to her in mistake for a shilling or as a spiteful joke, and each time she unwrapped the paper to look at it, this doubt crept in and disturbed the tranquil pleasure of her collector’s mood; but, remembering his face and the way he had looked at her and making allowances for the fact that boys always hated girls and thought they were soppy, he had seemed a kind boy, not the sort that would play a spiteful joke on a person, especially when he knew it was their birthday, and much nicer than the boys whom Amy, through Mona Beeding, occasionally had dealings with in Highbury.

  That boy, Robert Somebody, had made her think of the brave boys her mother used to read to her about; the fourteen-year-old Pony Express rider who shot half a score of Indians in a dead end of the mountains before their arrows got him at last, whom the Redskins would not dishonour by scalping because he was so brave and his hair (they said) “was like the rays of the sun”; and the fifteen-year-old Nelson on his Greenland voyage leaving the ship at night with one of his comrades to pursue a bear across the ice, which he attacked crying “Do but let me get a blow at this devil with the butt end of my musket and we shall have him.”

  Amy was sure that the Pony Express Riders and the young Nelson must have looked like the American boy at Kenwood, and she often wondered about him. What was he doing at that particular moment, far away in America? Had he any brothers and sisters? She had found New Leicester and Paul County and Vine Falls on the big tattered old atlas which she used as a hunting ground for names of places in her stories, and now they were as real to her as the American boy himself. She wished that they could be friends. She had often wished this about boys in books, but never before about a real boy, because the Highbury boys had such a way of rushing out and bumping into her, bursting open her attaché case full of school books and sending them all over the pavement, that it was quite impossible to imagine being friends with them. But she was sure that if she had been friends with that American boy he would have been different. He would have taken her on exciting expeditions without once reminding her that she was a girl, and when she saved his life he would have thanked her in the proper way in a voice that trembled as he wrung her hand.

  On the evenings when she did not feel like cutting out or writing, she would take one of the shabby old novels from the bookshelf and sit in front of the stove, dreaming over it rather than reading, for she knew all the books in her father’s small library almost by heart. Most of the books had belonged to Tim as an undergraduate and had travelled round with him as his later fortunes rose and fell, getting some rough handling. But they were sturdy late Victorian editions that wore well enough to shame the cardboard backs of to-day; and their thick paper, good type, touch of gilding on the cover and charming end-papers, thrown in out of sheer grace, made any reader sensitive to books feel that here was a friend; a good story well dressed. Tim did not care for reading nowadays, but he had grown up with books like these, and their stories were part of that mental furniture which stays in a man’s head through the steepest ups and downs. His own taste was for the minor classic, a type of book that has perhaps given more pure pleasure to more readers than any other kind, and as soon as Amy could read he had put her on to The Cloister and the Hearth, A Gentleman of France, Tom Burke of “Ours”, King Solomon’s Mines and many others.

  But Amy also had her own library, and it was chiefly one of books about America.

  The Wide, Wide World, given to her by her mother on her tenth birthday, had first fascinated her with its pictures of life in New England, its domestic details which were so different from those of England and yet so cosy-sounding. Ellen Montgomery had had biscuits and fried chicken for breakfast! And there was the mysterious incident of the birch-bark, when Miss Fortune (Amy hated Miss Fortune) dipped all Ellen’s white socks into a brew made from it, and turned them grey. America sounded a lovely place; Amy longed to hear more about it. The people talked English. If you went there, you would not be frightened because they were foreigners, and yet they were different enough to be interesting. And Amy began to linger by second-hand bookstalls, hunting for stories about America. Presently she found What Katy Did, and the other Katy books; and then Little Women and Good Wives, and later on the Indians of Fenimore Cooper crept into her imagination, treacherous and brilliant as swamp snakes. And then she found Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with the wild-voiced slaves of the South, and Dred: a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp by the same author, and a wonderful book called Down the Mississippi, about some children and a little negro boy who were swept away in a flood down the mighty river on the roof of the cabin in which they lived. And she found St. Elmo, with its wicked Southern hero and Edna, its lovely, learned heroine and the rich house bowered in magnolia flowers. She found Daisy and Daisy in the Field, and Say and Seal, with its shy saintly heroine, and leisurely blue rivers on whose shores the characters held clambakes. And last of all (but these belong not to America but to the world) on a misty November evening, on a
stall of filthy and dog-eared books guarded by a shivering old man, she found a copy of The Poems and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and the magic circle was complete.

  The volume was illustrated with blackish drawings taken from old wood blocks, and these, with the poems and tales, exercised upon her imagination a haunting spell, half horror, half fascination. After her mother’s death, when she began trying to be brave, one of the tests she set herself was to read one of the Tales without putting her hand over the picture to hide it as she read. But gradually the stories and poems began to charm as well as to haunt her, and at length she came to love them, part of her pleasure coming from her self-taught power to look at the picture of The Pit and the Pendulum, or the Lady Ligeia’s Burial, without fear (or with fear driven so deeply below the surface of her mind that she no longer knew it existed).

  In all these tests of courage her only desire was to make herself the brave girl that her mother had wanted her to be. She herself did not care if she were brave or a coward. She never thought, “It would be nicer and much more comfortable if I didn’t mind things, like Mona”; she secretly despised Mona because the latter never noticed the cut-up rabbits, the strong smells and noises and brutal wheels that frightened herself. Had her mother not tried to make her brave, Amy would have accepted her own cowardice without a second thought, for she was as unselfconscious as it is possible for a female organism to be; and her pretences at being a cowboy, a spy, the young Nelson, went on without ever tapping the sealed wells of introspection.

  When her mother had been dead for a year, an enormous space of time in a child’s world, Amy’s picture of her had become crystallized yet dim, and she could no longer think with certainty, “Mother would have done this or that.” Thus it never occurred to her that her mother would have teased her wholesomely about this desperate effort to make herself brave. The last thing Edie had wanted was for her beloved little daughter to be solemn, and she had loved to make Amy’s rare laughter ring out, to see her still, light brown eyes dance with amusement over some shared joke. She used to say that Amy had the nicest laugh she had ever heard, a fat deep sound that made anyone who heard it begin to laugh out of sheer infection, and all the funnier because it came out of such a serious little face.

  But since Edie died no one could make Amy laugh like that. She giggled with her fellow biscuit-eaters at the Anna Bonner and with Mona Beeding but she never—literally never—laughed, and so lonely was she and so uninterested in her were all the people by whom she was surrounded that none of them ever noticed that they had in their midst a child of twelve who never laughed.

  It would not be true to say that she was unhappy. Her life was full but sunless. The sun went out when her mother died, and she lived from that moment in the strange light (like that lying over the landscape before rain, magnifying trees and making distant objects seem near) of her mind’s natural country. It was inhabited by heroic figures slightly larger than life-size, and of these the little American boy, whose real nature and background were so completely the opposite of Amy’s own, was one. She thought of him, from time to time, as her own American, her own special and private representative of the United States of America, and as such he was dear to her as The Wolf of Leningrad and the young Nelson; and all the other dwellers in her private world.

  One night just before Christmas Eve, Amy was leaning out of the Highbury sitting-room window to get a breath of fresh air, staring at the glittering lights sweeping upwards on the hills of Hampstead and Highgate and the roofs glistening with frost under the small violet moon. Her head was dutifully wrapped up in an old jersey that had belonged to her mother, because this was what her mother would have made her do. The air smelled of coldness and soot. Her hands, tucked in the rough jersey, felt warm against her cheeks. She was dreaming, not thinking about anything, only feeling how exciting was the scene spread before her.

  Suddenly the side door of the house slammed and she looked down. Dora Beeding ran down the street with no hat on towards the public telephone box on the corner. Amy could hear the quick sound of her high heels on the pavement as she ran and once she slipped on the frost and only just saved herself from falling. She watched her jamming the pennies into the box, and impatiently waiting with the receiver at her ear, and saw her talking eagerly and nodding, inside the brightly-lit telephone box like someone on the stage. Then she came running back, and Amy heard the door slam.

  A few minutes later a taxi came round the corner and stopped outside the house. The driver climbed out and rang the Beeding’s bell, and when the door was opened he went in, leaving a yellow glow of light streaming across the frosty pavement.

  Amy leaned a little further out at the sound of voices and saw a group of people come slowly out of the house supporting someone in their midst. Sentences floated up to her.

  “All right, are you, Mum?”

  “Yes, thank you, luv.”

  “Oh, Mum! Your Stuff! Have you got it?”

  “Ay, I have, Mona. You needn’t shout at me.”

  “Shan’t be long now, mate,” said the taxi driver heartily, putting his arm round Mrs. Beeding to help her into the cab. “Orl right, are yer?”

  “Sure you’ve got everything, Mum?” This was Mona again, hovering on the edge of the group and managing to convey to anyone who might be watching that she was just a bundle of nerves and all this was almost too much for her.

  “Ay, I have, Mona. What d’yer think I been doin’ with meself this last fortnight? Dozin’ over them cinema papers o’ yours?” roundly retorted Mrs. Beeding from inside the taxi. “Go on in now, Mona, do; you’ll catch a cold and you know I can’t stand you round me with the snivels. Go on in, now. Come on, Dora, do; yer Dad’ll see to all that.”

  Amy saw Dora’s shining butter-yellow head vanish into the taxi, and watched while Mr. Beeding gave some last instructions to the driver and got in beside his daughter and wife. Then the taxi drove off and Mona, having watched it out of sight, wandered disconsolately back to the house.

  Oh, blow, now she’ll come up here after me, thought Amy, reluctantly drawing in her head and shutting the window. She did not want Mona to know she had been looking at the moon and the lights; Mona always said such feeble things.

  Sure enough, about fifteen minutes later, when she was sitting demurely by the stove reading The Daily Express (from which she gleaned a rich supply of information to make backgrounds for her stories), there came a tap at the door and Mona’s voice called:

  “Aime, are you there?” (Mona always shortened even unshortenable names; if she had known a Stella she would have called her Stel.)

  “Yes,” Amy answered, not encouragingly.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Reading.”

  “What?”

  “The Daily Express.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “I suppose so, if you want to.”

  On this gracious permission the door opened eagerly and Mona came in and perched on the table, swinging her fat legs in black stockings and gym. shoes. She was a plump girl of thirteen in tunic and white blouse, with a stupid pink face and sausage curls of the same wonderful yellow as her sister’s.

  “Mum’s been taken bad,” she began at once. “Dora ran out an’ got George on the phone an’ he said he’d come right away. They’ve just gone off to the Royal Northern. Mum an’ Dad an’ Dora. Dora an’ Dad’ll just see her settled in an’ come back, they said.”

  Amy listened, sitting back in the armchair with her feet off the ground, looking politely at Mona. She did not say that she had watched Mrs. Beeding’s departure from the window.

  “My heart, Aime, I didn’t half feel awful when it started. I was in the scullery just rinsin’ up a few crocks for Mum ’n case she didn’t feel up to it ter-morrow before breakfast an’—my heart! I heard Dora say to her, ‘Mum, joo feel all right?’ she said. Well, I thought I was goin’ to faint. Honest, everything went black. I sort of swayed—you know. My heart! I thought, I know what that m
eans.”

  She paused for breath, extending a rather dirty hand decorated by a Woolworth ring upon her fat chest, and sighed.

  “How soon will she be back?” asked Amy, wishing Mona would go away, for though she sometimes enjoyed a gossip with her, this was not one of her Mona evenings.

  “No-body can say, that’s what’s so awful,” burst out Mona dramatically. “George says Mrs. Culver was three days with her Peggy, on’y of course Peggy was her first an’ this’ll be Mum’s fifth. Course, the more you have the easier it is.” Then she clapped her hand over her mouth and glanced quickly at Amy, but the pale little face was turned towards the stove and Amy was miles away. Mrs. Beeding’s body was in the Royal Northern Hospital, but her will lay just as firmly upon her daughter as though she had been there in the room with the two girls, and Mona had been told more than once, very plainly, that she was not to say Anything Like That to little Amy, who was still a child. Anything Like That that’s got to be said, I’ll say, had promised Mrs. Beeding. She had a good mother, Amy had, and I know she’d have liked me to keep an eye on her and so I will, while that father of her’s keeps on my top flat. You don’t want to go saying Anything to her, Mona; there’s plenty of time.