An Orphan's Winter

by Sheila Jeffries

  With her hair streaming, she swam down towards it, her hands outstretched. The minute she touched it, the oyster shell began to open, and Matt detached his long limbs from her, letting her go, making her hold her breath until her lungs were on fire. Without him she felt stressed and responsible, compelled to stay and watch the oyster shell struggling to open.

  Lottie forced herself to stay down there until, in a moment of glory, the shell finally burst open, and inside its luminous cavern lay a shining pearl. She picked it up and held it against her heart as she swam up and up until she surfaced through the nets of sunlight. Clutching the precious pearl, she swam to The Jenny Wren where Matt was sitting with his head in his hands.

  ‘It’s okay, Matt,’ she said, and she put the shining pearl into his hand. They both stared at it with the utmost joy. It was then that they heard Arnie’s voice. It came from the sea all around them. Lottie cried out in fright. ‘Where are you, Arnie?’ and he answered immediately, ‘I’m in the pearl. Look after me. I’m very small.’

  Suddenly, she snapped back into consciousness, and the colours around her looked earthy and heavy after the iridescence of the oyster shell in her dream.

  Matt was awake, holding her, his face a mix of amusement and concern. ‘You were dreaming, Lottie. You cried out.’

  She tried to tell the dream to Matt but all he said was, ‘Your face is red as a strawberry.’

  Then, across the bay came the distant chimes of the church clock. ‘Oh no!’ Lottie was horrified. ‘It can’t be four o’clock already! There’s no way I can get home in time for Jenny to think I’ve been to school – I’m in terrible trouble.’

  *

  ‘Momter,’ Warren mumbled.

  ‘That’s right – a thermometer,’ Jenny said, before she tucked it under Warren’s armpit. ‘Hold it tight and we’ll count to sixty. Then it will tell me what your temperature is.’

  ‘Wuzzat?’

  ‘Temperature? It means how hot you are.’

  Warren looked wizened lying on the sofa, his face flushed, his eyelids heavy. He gazed at Jenny constantly, his eyes following her every movement. ‘Dogs do that,’ Nan said. ‘It’s anxiety.’

  Jenny thought of Nan’s words as she made a glass of rosehip cordial for Warren. She had no one to ask except Nan, and Nan was often crabby and uncommunicative, tossing out crumbs of wisdom and walking away. Jenny missed her neighbour Millie who had lived next door to their old home in Downlong. Millie had a wonderful way with children and she’d mothered Lottie and Tom, even Jenny. Matt had been difficult but Millie understood how to handle him, finding the good bits of his complex personality and building his confidence. When Millie had left St Ives to live in Penzance with her sister, it had been like a bereavement.

  Millie would know exactly how to treat Warren. If only I could find her, Jenny thought, a plan hatching in her mind.

  Warren took the glass of cordial eagerly and downed it in noisy gulps, his eyes still watching Jenny.

  ‘You sound like the tide coming in,’ she said, but Warren didn’t smile. Humour was lost on him, even gentle humour. What could have happened to make a ten-year-old boy so deadly serious? Jenny wondered. The only time Warren came alive was when he played the piano accordion, but despite Jenny’s efforts to encourage him, Warren refused to pick it up again, even if Tom left it lying on the sofa. He eyed it, and crept round it in a deliberate circle. Then Nan would come in and bellow, ‘What is that instrument doing there?’

  Right now, Warren had a fever, and it was difficult to know how best to look after him. Jenny glanced at the clock. Lottie would read Warren a story and help him settle down. It was five o’clock. Where was she? Jenny felt annoyed but not worried. Lottie would be with her father or Morwenna.

  She left Warren dozing on the sofa and worked in the kitchen, hoping to spot Lottie coming up the lane, her school bag heavy with books.

  Since her illness, Lottie had come home from school pale-faced and serious. The long school day seemed to be draining her. So when Lottie finally came swinging in, her nose and cheeks a fiery pink from the sun, Jenny looked at her suspiciously. It wasn’t just the sunburn. It was that strange radiance again, a glow all around her, and in her eyes both a light and a shadow.

  Jenny trusted Lottie – didn’t she? ‘Where’ve you been, my girl?’ She found herself pursuing the shadow. Evasiveness – deep in the eyes. ‘How come you’ve caught the sun?’

  ‘I went to sleep at lunch time.’

  ‘What? In the playground?’

  Lottie looked at her silently.

  ‘So . . . how long do you get for lunch?’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  ‘You couldn’t have burned like that in half an hour,’ Jenny frowned. ‘Your nose is already peeling.’ She opened the heavy oak door to the medicine cupboard, which was a stone cubbyhole to keep the remedies cool. ‘Calamine lotion is what you need.’ She gave the bottle a vigorous shake, opened it and dabbed some of the pink lotion on Lottie’s blistered skin with a piece of cotton wool.

  Lottie shook her head. ‘I don’t want it on my face, Jenny. It looks unspeakably disgusting.’

  ‘You sound like Nan!’ Jenny teased. ‘Let it dry and it will take the fire out of your sunburn.’ She tried to make eye contact but Lottie wouldn’t look at her. ‘You’d better tell me where you’ve been today. I hope you haven’t been playing truant.’

  Lottie lifted her chin. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said airily. ‘I’ve got homework to do.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d read Warren a story.’

  Lottie sighed. ‘Okay – on one condition,’ she said. ‘I’ll read Warren a story if you stop interrogating me, Jenny. I’m not a child.’

  Jenny blew her cheeks out. ‘All right, madam, but I’ll be watching you,’ she threatened. ‘This had better not have anything to do with Matt.’

  Guilt flickered in Lottie’s eyes. ‘I said I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘I understand that – but, Lottie, you are all right, aren’t you?’

  ‘Perfect, thank you.’

  ‘And you’d tell me if anything bad happened to you?’

  ‘I might. Or I might not.’

  Jenny stared at her, a wad of cotton wool still in her hand. Lottie could be infuriatingly stubborn. She was looking at Jenny now and the mysterious radiance was still there, illuminating a very assertive, adult stare.

  I suppose I’ll have to let her be, Jenny thought.

  Chapter 11

  Unthinkable

  Lottie stared at Morwenna in horror. ‘That’s not true – is it?’

  The two girls were sitting on the warm sand at the top of Porthmeor Beach. Above their heads the sand martins flitted to and fro, feeding their young, their nests in cosy holes at the top of the sandy cliff.

  ‘It is true, Lottie. Cross my heart,’ Morwenna insisted, her eyes soft and truthful. ‘My mum explained it to me after she told me off for lying in the grass with Bennie Jenkins. We were only kissing, but she didn’t believe me.’

  ‘Nobody’s told me,’ Lottie said.

  ‘Well, you haven’t got a proper mum, have you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Jenny’s got her leg in an iron – and that lady from America doesn’t look after you, does she? Even if she is your real mum. And as for Nan – she’s a dragon in an apron; everyone’s scared stiff of her.’

  Lottie tried to digest her friend’s tactless honesty. At any other time it might have made her angry, but so great was her need to understand Morwenna’s shocking revelations about how babies were made that she bypassed the anger and let it run beside her like a barking dog. The feelings inside her were building storm waves foaming with curiosity, disbelief and panic.

  ‘Come and talk to my mum if you don’t believe me, Lottie. She said you could,’ Morwenna reminded her.

  ‘No, I couldn’t. She’d gossip.’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t.’

  ‘She would.’

&
nbsp; Morwenna looked hurt. ‘My mum’s rough an’ ready, but she’s kind to me – and she tells me anything I need to know.’

  Lottie stared at her friend. Morwenna sat in the soft white sand, her legs tucked under the heavy drapes of her only dress, which had once been red but was now a threadbare russet colour, sun-bleached along the folds and frayed around the hem. It was too small for her now, the fabric straining over her breasts, but Lottie couldn’t remember her wearing anything else. Morwenna had two aprons, both made from old bed sheets, and she went to work in the bakery in her brother’s boots. She never wore a new hair ribbon so Lottie had given her a new cerise pink one from America. Morwenna loved it too much to ever take it off, and it was looking tatty.

  ‘My American mother has gone to London for a while – thank goodness,’ Lottie said, ‘but I’ve got my father now and he’s kind to me.’

  Morwenna snorted. ‘But he’s a man, and you can’t talk to men about periods and babies. And if he’s kind, you watch out, Lottie – he might interfere with you.’

  ‘What do you mean – interfere?’

  Morwenna gave her a pitying look. ‘He’s a pervert, Lottie, it’s time someone told you.’

  ‘He is not a pervert.’ Lottie clenched her hands together to stop herself from slapping Morwenna. She wasn’t actually sure what a pervert was, except that it was something bad and secretive, something horribly alive in the catacombs of shame.

  ‘He is, Lottie – everyone knows. He stands in his gallery doorway leering at all the women – and he paints women with no clothes on.’

  ‘He is not,’ Lottie said, furious with Morwenna. ‘How dare you insult my father!’

  Morwenna pumped herself up, towering in the sand like a territorial blackbird. ‘Don’t shout at me, Lottie. I’m your friend and I’m trying to tell you a few home truths. You’re too innocent.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Yes, you are. I know you study books and all that, but you still don’t know things that really matter.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Like how babies are made.’

  Blinding tears of rage ran down Lottie’s cheeks. She hardly heard what her friend was saying now. Morwenna’s flagrant accusation against her father, her gentle father who’d been so kind to her, had stung. How could he be a ‘pervert’? And how could her best friend say something so insensitive?

  ‘Aw, don’t cry, Lottie.’ Morwenna leaned over to give her a hug.

  ‘Don’t touch me.’ Lottie twisted out of reach, her mouth pursed, her mind struggling with the enormous worry that must be kept secret. She and Matt had promised each other. Secret love. Like Romeo and Juliet. Love forever trapped. What would happen when its delicate eggshell cracked open? I am the shell, Lottie thought, and my best friend is smashing it.

  Morwenna’s eyes became insolent and glinting with confidence, as if she held all the cards in a game.

  ‘Anyway, it’s true what I told you,’ Morwenna tossed her mane of tangled hair, ‘about babies. And it’s true your dad’s a pervert – so stop being so hoity-toity.’

  The eggshell trembled. Lottie jumped to her feet. ‘I hate you, Morwenna Bartle,’ she screamed, ‘and I’ll never speak to you again.’

  ‘Oh yes you will,’ Morwenna teased. She climbed to her feet. ‘‘Cause I’m the only friend you’ve got, and if you’re doing what I think you’re doing out on that boat with Matt, you’re heading for trouble and you’re gonna need me, d’you hear?’ she yelled as Lottie turned to walk away. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You’re heading for trouble and you’ll end up an outcast.’

  Lottie ploughed her way across the sun-baked sand, Morwenna’s words flying after her like wasps. Scarily true. ‘You’re gonna need me, Lottie Lanroska. See if you don’t, Miss Hoity Toity.’

  Lottie didn’t look back. Gnawing at the edges of her fury was a doom-laden suspicion that Morwenna was right. If the unthinkable happened, Morwenna and her mum would be her only friends. She’d lose everything: Jenny, Nan, her home, her education. Her future.

  Only Matt would stand by her. Wouldn’t he?

  Lottie didn’t feel like going home. She couldn’t bear to see her father – or anyone. She didn’t even want to go to the harbour and see if The Jenny Wren was there.

  She stumbled along the rocky path around the island. Surf was breaking on dark, wet rocks in rising fans of spray, the drops whiter than snow against a sea of peacock blue. Halfway along the track was a massive boulder of granite, bearded with sage-green lichen. Tufts of white sea campion and red stonecrop grew in its cracks, and a lone seagull was there, just sitting, eyeing people.

  Lottie leaned against the rock, alone like the seagull, her entire life passing before her in a useless pageant.

  Had she and Matt made a baby? Was it, even now, growing inside her? She put her hands over her tummy. It felt normal except for the scar from her operation, which was still a bit tender.

  As the anger subsided, Morwenna’s words flew through her mind, rippling like a banner. Morwenna told lies, but only when she was in trouble. Denial-type lies. She didn’t, and couldn’t, fantasise. She was Lottie’s best friend. Her eyes had shone with honesty and concern when she was telling Lottie how babies were conceived.

  I was wrong not to listen, Lottie thought, annoyed with herself. She’s right – I was being hoity-toity.

  Lottie sat facing the sea, her back against the warm rock. She picked at the seed heads of grasses, tearing the bleached ripe seeds from their stalks. It wasn’t something she normally did. Watching the seeds trickle from her hands, seeing them cluster on patches of bare soil seemed to be a lesson she had never learned: their mysterious inner power to grow and reproduce.

  I am the earth, she thought, and Matt is the seed. Matt gave me a seed. Well, he might have. And he didn’t mean to. Because neither of us knew.

  Each thought seared into her, burning her mind and all the books in there, the stories and the poetry. We were so young when we lost our family. Matt was eleven and I was ten when everything was snatched away. Arnie died. Jenny got polio. And we were imprisoned in that orphanage where we worked like slaves and learned nothing except how to survive.

  Miss Poltair had masterminded the girls’ part of the orphanage. She was cruel and cold, stout and unsmiling. Joyless. Lottie did remember her giving the girls a talk about menstruation and how to manage it. The girls had sat rigid, hardly breathing. Menstruation was made to sound like a monthly punishment for being female. Babies were not mentioned, and neither were men.

  Lottie sighed. Somewhere between menstruation and romantic literature, a vital truth had been missed.

  *

  ‘I’m not a childminder,’ Nan said, ‘especially for that.’ She jerked her thumb at Warren who was finishing his breakfast, his eyes wary in the presence of Nan.

  ‘Please, Nan. Just this once,’ Jenny pleaded. ‘I’m taking Lottie to the doctor. Warren’s not well enough to go to school yet.’

  Nan frowned. She picked up Lottie’s plate, which had an untouched slice of buttered toast on it. ‘Lottie’s all right, isn’t she? Why take her to the doctor?’

  ‘Because all last week she was like this,’ Jenny explained, ‘refusing to eat her breakfast. She says she feels sick, but she still went to school. If it was only the odd day I wouldn’t be concerned, but she’s been sick every morning for a whole week, and she’s getting worse. We can’t take any risks, Nan, not after the illness she had on the ship. Better safe than sorry.’

  ‘And where is she now?’ Nan asked.

  ‘In the bathroom. You should have seen her, Nan. She went white and just ran upstairs. She can’t stop being sick.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Nan narrowed her eyes in silence.

  ‘He won’t be any trouble – will you, Warren?’ Jenny said, and Warren shook his head. ‘You don’t need to do anything except keep an eye on him, Nan.’

  Nan agreed reluctantly. She felt irritable around Warren and only gave in for Lottie’s sake. In he
r opinion, Lottie’s sickness could be fixed with ginger tea. And as for Warren, Nan found him infuriatingly gauche and uncommunicative. She marvelled at Jenny’s patience with him and had to admit that progress had been made. But what was behind Warren’s fathomless eyes, Nan had no idea, and her attempts to find out had been a waste of time. Warren remained stubbornly unresponsive and Nan resented him being there, another mouth to feed and a drain on Jenny’s energy. It had been hard enough for her to get used to sharing her home with Jenny. Without her, Nan would have handed Warren to the welfare officer.

  She stood in the open doorway and watched them go down the lane, Lottie white-faced and unwilling, Jenny limping along determinedly. Once they had disappeared from view, Nan made herself a bowl of porridge with a swirl of honey. Warren sat hunched on the deep windowsill, his chin on his knees, his eyes studying a flock of yellowhammers flying over the gorse flowers. Or was he staring out at the Clodgy rocks, remembering his time of living wild?

  Nan made no attempt to talk to him, but she couldn’t help sensing the loneliness within the strange boy. Surely he had a family somewhere. Whoever they were, Nan felt angry with them and began mentally rehearsing what she would say to them if they bothered to turn up. Annoyed that Jenny had made no effort to trace his parents, Nan began to think she should take matters into her own hands. A bit of private research. A few discreet trips out in the car. What if she drove around some of the villages and asked questions? And, why not take Warren with her? Maybe he would recognise a place where he’d lived.

  Warren was looking at her anxiously, appearing to sense her thoughts. Nan finished her porridge, struggled to her feet and began clearing the table. Lottie or Tom would have jumped up and helped her, she reflected. They were good kids. Thanks to Jenny, Nan thought, begrudgingly. But Warren didn’t do anything, nor did he seem inclined to do anything. He just sat. Like a little old man. A grumpy gnome, Nan thought mischievously.

  It seemed odd to be marooned with a boy who wouldn’t or couldn’t talk. Words were no good, so how could she communicate with him? How could she reach that spark of intelligence in his eyes? Nan believed everything happened for a reason. Was this time alone with Warren a celestial masterplan to encourage her to engage with him? If I opened my mouth, it would frighten Warren to death, Nan thought, so she kept it shut. But music talks to the soul without words; maybe she could reach Warren with music . . .