A smoky fire was sputtering behind the sooty fireguard on the tiled hearth. Open cards were pinned like butterflies to most of the wall above the fireplace, and some weren’t Christmas cards but messages of condolence. The room smelled of used cigarettes—several half-smoked broken ones had gathered in an ashtray on a small squat table—and of the dog. His basket nestled against a sofa, half of which was occupied by an open photograph album. “Sit down, don’t be shy,” Mrs Norris said.
Of course this made me shyer. As she sat beside the album and Winston lay down in his basket I perched on the edge of an armchair, poising myself to escape. “My mum’s made mince pies. She says come and have one.”
“That’s thoughtful, but I’d better not if you could tell her, Dominic. If I leave the dog he’ll disturb the neighbours.”
I wondered when he’d started doing that, since I’d often seen her out by herself, not least visiting the cemetery. “I know Mrs Sheldrake doesn’t like dogs in the house,” she said, “and he’ll only let the street know if I leave him outside.”
“I could take him for a double you eh el kay,” I said so as not to rouse him with the word, “if you like.”
“You’re a good boy and we’ve always said so.” I assumed this brought Mr Norris to mind, since she paused while her gaze retreated inwards. “Just apologise for me to your mother,” she said. “Say I have to stay in for the postman.”
I could have thought she’d taken time to find a further excuse to remain in the house. “Your parents could come here if they liked,” she said.
“My dad’s at work.”
“Oh, I see,” Mrs Norris said as if she suspected my mother of waiting until he was out of the way. “Perhaps another day, then,” she said, though without much faith.
I was about to make my escape—however muffled the fire was, the room felt oppressively warm—when Mrs Norris picked up the photograph album. “That’s my Herbert,” she said.
It was a snap of Mr Norris some years younger than I’d ever known him, in an army uniform. He looked determined, and not just to smile. Once I’d mumbled an acknowledgement Mrs Norris turned the page while still holding the album towards me. “There he is again,” she said.
She was showing me another photograph of him in the same uniform—more recent, with a thinner face and a faraway look in his eyes that suggested he was searching for some aspect of the past—but I was distracted by Winston’s behaviour. The dog was watching the hall through the doorway, and now he raised his head as if some activity out there had prompted him. At once I wondered if Mrs Norris hadn’t been talking about the album, an idea that made me blurt “Do you still hear him?”
She lowered the album and cradled it on her lap while she held my gaze with hers. “I never told you about that,” she said as though she had to reassure herself. “You heard me talking to your parents.”
“I wasn’t spying,” I protested.
“No need to shout at me, Dominic. Everybody thinks there is.” She shook her head, dislodging a wry grimace. “I can understand how you might have heard,” she said.
“Does Mr Norris?”
Perhaps I’d lowered my voice too much, because she frowned. “What are you saying?”
“Mr Norris. Does he talk like that?”
“He only has to whisper. That’s how close he comes.” When her mouth struggled to fix on a shape I was afraid she was going to show more emotion than I could cope with, but she wiped it with the back of her hand as though to rid it of a taste. Almost too low for me to hear she said “I don’t like how he feels, though.”
Winston had turned his head towards the elongated shadow that lay low behind the sofa. I was both anxious and reluctant to ask “Where is he now?
“Perhaps he’s here. I don’t know till he lets me know. He hides in things, Dominic.”
She hadn’t looked away from me, and I could have thought she was nervous of glancing around the room. I didn’t know how to take her remark, which I would rather not have heard at all. Might the doors of the sideboard creep open to reveal Mr Norris packed inside, twisted into some grotesque shape to fit the space? Or was the cushion sagging on the empty armchair about to shift into some version of his face? “I’d better go,” I muttered and stood up just as awkwardly. “Mum wants me to fetch things from the allotment.”
“I’m sorry if I scared you. You know he’d never harm you, don’t you? Wouldn’t you like to see more of him before you go?”
Of course she meant the album, but I was nervous of another meaning. “I will next time,” I promised, though it felt a good deal like a lie. “Merry Christmas.”
“You be sure and have one, and your parents too.” She closed the album so gradually that she might have been laying the images to rest, unless she was wishing she had stayed content with her memories. As I edged towards the door she murmured “I’m almost sorry I met him.”
My dismay must have been apparent, because she raised her voice. “Not my Herbert, Dominic. Never him.”
“Who, then?”
“Mr Noble, I was meaning.”
Of course we could have known two different people with that name, but my world was too small to admit the possibility. “Who?” I said in a bid for disbelief.
“Christian Noble,” Mrs Norris said and looked wary. “I thought you heard me talking to your parents. He’s the gentleman who has done so much for our church.”
“You never said his name.” Now I had to ask “What’s he like?”
“He’s very tall. You could say he’s imposing.” I think I was still hoping to be proved wrong as I said “What does he do?”
“I don’t think your father would want me telling you about that, Dominic.”
“No.” I was growing desperate for the truth. “Mr Noble, does he have another job?”
“That isn’t a job. It’s his mission.” Mrs Norris sounded offended enough to make this her entire answer, but I saw her taking pity on my age. “I believe he’s a teacher,” she said.
I remembered seeing him for the first time. As I’d watched him push the pram through the graveyard, Mrs Norris had been ready to tell my parents about him. It made me feel events had converged on me, as if I’d been singled out somehow. I wanted to be alone to ponder what I’d learned. “I ought to go,” I said, which felt like renewing my confinement in the oppressive almost airless room.
“Yes, you’ve said.” Mrs Norris sighed and laid the album next to her on the sofa. “Stay,” she added twice as loud.
In a moment, though an unpleasantly prolonged one, I realised she was talking not to me but to Winston. The dog had lifted his head when his mistress stood up, and now it sank between his paws as if he felt no less imprisoned than I had. From the hall I saw him watching the elongated shadow like a trench behind the sofa. “Don’t forget your pence,” Mrs Norris said.
She took her purse out of her handbag on the post at the foot of the banisters and produced a bright two-shilling piece. “That’s from both of us,” she said, “for Christmas.”
“Thank you very much indeed.” This would have made my parents proud of how they were bringing me up, but then on an impulse I called “Thank you, Mr Norris.”
Mrs Norris parted her lips, which emitted a dry sound like a shrivelled word. I felt as if I were taking a breath on her behalf to let her say “Did you hear him?”
I heard a soft restless sound in the front room and hoped it was only the dog. “No,” I blurted, bruising my fingers on the latch in my haste to leave the house.
I didn’t slow down much until I reached home, only to realise that I hadn’t prepared anything to tell my mother. She was wielding brush and dustpan in the hall, and stared past me as I opened the front door—I could almost have imagined she saw someone at my back, “Is Mrs Norris on her way?” she said.
“She can’t bring Winston and she doesn’t want to leave him at home.”
“You could have taken him out for her if you’d let me know. Another time you can. Now fe
tch me some potatoes, please. The best ones for Christmas.”
The entrance to the allotments was on the main road, past a row of five shops. The bacon slicer in the butcher’s gave a huge metallic squeal—no, a passing tram did, together with a crackling flash. Whenever I unlatched the wooden gate and crossed the field divided into plots of vegetables, I felt as if the countryside that used to be there had ambitions to return. I thought gardeners might have been collecting Christmas produce, but I was alone in the allotments. I found a trowel and a frayed brown canvas bag in the communal shed and made my way around the grid of narrow earthy paths to our plot, which was near the graveyard hedge. I dug up half a dozen hulking spuds and dropped them in the bag, and was stooping to retrieve it when I faltered. I’d seen someone else in that position round here, and at last I realised who.
As the memory came into focus I saw that he’d bent to pick whatever had been growing on the grave exactly as I’d seen him stoop towards the pram and lean towards boys he was addressing, me included. Leaving the bag of potatoes on the path, I went to peer over the hedge. Where exactly had Mr Noble been standing? If I couldn’t detect that I would be letting the Tremendous Three down. When I’d watched him from my window he had been just beyond a statue, which meant that the grave was just in front of it now—in front of the Mother of God, whose marble arm was lifted in a blessing that had vanished along with her hand, so that she appeared to be displaying an injury she might have suffered on a battlefield. The grave I’d located was marked with a family headstone, the most recent date on which was 1952. The family name wasn’t Noble. That didn’t appear on the gravestone at all.
The grave was spread with gravel inside a rectangular stone border. A granite vase full of flowers stood in front of the headstone, and a few inches of the far end of the gravelled plot were green. While I didn’t know why this should matter, I strained my eyes until I made out that the growth was clover. As I stared at the tiny leaves they appeared to stir like a nest of torpid insects. No doubt my vision was the problem, since the grass around the grave didn’t shift. I grabbed the lumpy sack, and as I hurried home I heard carollers making their way from house to house.
“Somebody’s hungry,” my mother said when she saw the contents of the sack, so that I thought she was saying I’d dug up too much until she added “That’s all right, it’s not a sin. We aren’t planting for anyone else.”
As a toddler I’d been aware that we contributed much of our produce, a duty that my mother often told me was helping soldiers such as my father. “Does it matter where you grow things?” I was inspired to ask.
“It depends on the soil. Why are you asking?”
If I mentioned how I’d seen Mr Noble at the grave she was bound to tell my father. Given his view of Mrs Norris’s beliefs, he would certainly condemn Mr Noble’s behaviour. He might even move me to a different school, leaving behind friends I’d made there, not to mention Dom. “Just wondered,” I said.
“I’ve been working like a nigger all day,” my father declared as soon as he came in, not a usage that would have raised an eyebrow in even the politest company back then. “I think we can open that sherry, love. It’s as good as Christmas.”’
He won a tussle with the cork as my mother took the coat he’d draped over a kitchen chair into the hall to hang it up. He filled two waspish glasses to the brim while my mother protested about having to sip from hers before she could pick it up, and then my parents clinked them against my tumbler of tart squash. “Here’s to better years,” my father said. “How’s the day been treating you?”
“I’ve got on with everything, and Dominic’s been a help.”
“You know I’m watching out for items that will save you work. Go shopping in the New Year, that’s the drill,” my father said. “I hope you know what a pearl we’ve got, son. What have you been doing for her?”
“You won’t need to go to the allotment, Desmond,” my mother said. “And he went to ask Mrs Norris to keep me company, but what was her excuse, Dominic?”
“Winston might have upset someone. Mum says I can take him for walks.”
“Good on you, son, but I’ll tell you what, Mary, you don’t need to wait till I’m out of the way to invite her. She knows where I stand and that should be the end of it. Besides, it’s Christmas.”
“You can take him if Mrs Norris says so, Dominic. You still haven’t told me how she is.”
“A bit lonely, I think.”
“I don’t want that being my fault, Mary. Maybe I should go round and invite her myself.”
“I should think she’d appreciate it,” my mother said without looking away from me. “Is that all, Dominic?”
I’d been taught that reading thoughts was God’s trick, but my mother seemed proficient at it too. “I think,” I admitted, “she may be a bit frightened as well.”
“Her church can’t have helped her much,” my father said, “with all their mumble jumble.”
If the last phrase was a joke intended to placate my mother, it didn’t work, “I thought you’d finished talking about that,” she said.
“I’ll be mum if it’ll keep the peace,” my father said and winked at me. “Two mums in the house.”
“Did Mrs Norris say why she was worried, Dominic?”
It seemed safe to risk a little of the truth. “She thinks Mr Norris is hiding.”
My father’s affability vanished as if he’d poured it back into the bottle. “Hiding how?”
“Somewhere in her house. Maybe everywhere.”
“She told you that.” My father doubled his outrage by informing my mother “She said all that to him.”
“No, dad.” I could only try to make amends for having said too much, “I just thought I heard her talking to Mr Norris.”
My father stared at me, but he lacked my mother’s skill for judging when I’d been stingy with the truth. “You can forget about the dog. I don’t want you anywhere near that house.”
Disappointment not far from a sense of betrayal made me blurt “You don’t believe Mrs Norris, do you, dad?”
“Of course I don’t, and your mother doesn’t. Mr Norris is in purgatory, where we all hope to go.”
I wasn’t sure I did, but I said “Then I don’t believe her either.”
“I hope you never did, son.”
“That’s what I meant. I don’t think she’s very well.”
“All this nonsense she’s involved with could have driven her potty,” my father conceded, mostly to my mother. “You’d have to be deluded to get mixed up with it in the first place.”
“Shouldn’t someone keep an eye on her, dad? I can. You said we do what neighbours are supposed to.”
When he frowned I thought he’d realised that I’d eavesdropped on their conversation, but he only said “I don’t know if it should be you, son.”
“I told her I’d walk Winston, and you say I should always keep my word.”
“They’ve taught him how to argue at this school, don’t you think, love?” I wasn’t sure how favourably he viewed this until he said “You use all your brain if it gets you on, Dominic. We want you in a better job than mine.”
None of this was an answer, but I’d learned not to insist. Having lingered over a sip of sherry, he said “We’ll see about you and the dog after Christmas.”
“I can’t believe he’ll come to any harm, Desmond, when it’s Mrs Norris.”
“He’ll need to tell us anything at all that’s wrong. That isn’t snitching, son. It’s looking after someone who may want it even if she doesn’t know she does.”
“I will, then,” I said, but I was vowing not to report anything that might turn my father against Mrs Norris, and not only her. His reaction had shown me how much more hostile he would be to Mr Noble if he learned the teacher was responsible for her beliefs. That was when I pledged not to let my parents know the medium she’d mentioned was my teacher or to tell them any number of the things he said. Looking back, I can only attempt to believ
e that if I’d told them at the time it would have made no difference to the world.
5 - Meeting the Family
That Christmas Day the entire country fell silent while the new queen made her first broadcast to the nation, or so my parents led me to believe. It felt to me like yet another of the rituals adults insisted upon. The routine with my school cap had begun to put me in mind of how some people used to have to touch their forelock. Half the time I hardly seemed to have a chance to sit down before I had to stand up—whenever a lady entered the room or a teacher did, or repeatedly in church for no purpose I could grasp, or at the end of a film show, when they put on the National Anthem. Even then some filmgoers remained seated however much my parents and other patrons frowned at them, which helped to convince me that the practice was meaningless, and were the other customs any more meaningful? Now I feel almost nostalgic for them—for rites that don’t alter the world.
“I am speaking to you from my own home, where I am spending Christmas with my family; and let me say at once how I hope that your children are enjoying themselves as much as mine are…” My mother smiled at me to ensure I appreciated the queen’s wish, but it left me impatient to enjoy my presents, to read a new book or play table soccer with my father or try to win more marbles with the ones I’d been given in a bag. Now the queen was talking about families, but I didn’t think hers or her home would be much like ours, and I’d begun to suspect her of reading from a script, not least because she sounded even more unnaturally precise than the announcers on the radio or most of the people in films. When she said we were all part of a bigger family—the British Empire—my father agreed with a weighty nod. I was more taken with “that courageous spirit of adventure that is the finest quality of youth” and wondered how soon the Tremendous Three might find a new mission. The queen wanted everyone to “build a truer knowledge of ourselves”, but she could never have predicted what this would come to mean. She or her scriptwriter thought that “the tremendous forces of science” could be used for “the betterment of man’s lot upon this earth”, and I recalled that scientists had just discovered the secret of creation, though the Big Bang was one of the increasing number of issues I felt wary of discussing with my parents. The queen rounded off her speech by anticipating her coronation and asking us to pray for her on that occasion. When my father sat back in his armchair by the fire and clasped his fingers together I thought he was going to propose an immediate prayer, but he was only miming satisfaction. “The country’s in good hands,” he said.
The Searching Dead Page 4
