by Sara Banerji
When a pause came while Elizabeth turned the record and wound again, Sissy whispered, ‘There’s something about that hoarse soft voice that makes me think of the name Leo.’
‘What voice?’ said George, then, getting it, ‘What, that awful bellowing in the garden?’
Sissy winced and said, ‘It makes me feel like crying.’
‘The person who’s singing is just a grown-up man. Like Mr Parson,’ sneered George.
‘I should think Leo is as different from Mr Parson as it’s possible to be,’ announced Sissy passionately.
‘If he took his clothes off,’ said George ominously, ‘he’d have hairy dangling things just like Mr Parson, I bet.’
‘He would not,’ cried Sissy, her eyes stinging.
‘What would he be like, then, if he took his trousers off?’ persisted George.
Sissy said nothing but into her mind came the memory of the moving animal inside the trousers of the Italian prisoner. Leo’s would be like that; secret, terrifying, thrilling. Not fragile, sensitive, and too easily despairing, like George’s little white equivalent.
Elizabeth had got the record turning again.
‘Don’t you agree, though? About the ducks?’ came George’s voice, puncturing the loveliness.
Sissy tried to remember how the breathing of someone asleep was and to imitate it so that she could listen to the music.
George said, anger seething back into his tone again, ‘I know you’re awake, Sis. I can see your eyelids twitching. You’re paying attention to that bloody Leo, aren’t you?’
‘Mmm … num … bumble …’ murmured Sissy, trying to do an approximation of sleep-talking. Sissy had no difficulty in hearing the rich baritone, for Elizabeth liked her music loud so that it drowned the sound of war and austerity.
‘You love him more than me,’ grumbled George sulkily.
Sissy opened her eyes slowly, like somebody just waking up.
‘Oh God!’ shouted George and with wild frustration, began to bang his head against the bed-rail.
‘Don’t make such a noise,’ begged Sissy. ‘Even with all that music she might still hear, and then she’ll know we’re having a row and use it against us.’
If Elizabeth’s children had a disagreement Elizabeth always said things that, had Sissy or George taken them seriously, would have increased their animosity.
Oh, poor George. Of course you must let him ride your bike if he wants. I’m sure he didn’t mean to puncture the tyres last time,’ or ‘I think you should carry it for Sissy, George. After all she is a girl.’ The children grew to fear their mother’s interventions suspecting that, far from being interested in peacemaking, she wanted them to dislike each other, thinking perhaps that then they would like her more.
But, on this night, George’s anger and hurt were too great.
‘How could you like Leo more than me? Has he ever looked down your bottom hole with a candle?’ howled George.
‘Oh, shh, oh, shh, George!’ Sissy begged.
George shouted, ‘I don’t bloody care if she hears!’
The next morning, Sissy woke and found George gone. The discovery distressed her wildly. She stared desolately at the empty dent where he had been and began crying.
She did not know why she felt so upset, for George often went out in the early morning, but this time great tears suddenly heaved out of her, not just her eyes crying but her whole body, which started convulsing like a person having a fit. She lay down again and luxuriated in her howling, allowing herself to bellow quite loudly, and stopping sometimes, to hear the cooing of the wood pigeons outside, the wet jabber of ducks, and the mingled strenuous rumbles of planes and bumble-bees. She cried for ages and, between the bouts, she would get up and go over to the mirror to examine her screwed-up red face.
After a long time, her skin stinging and her ribs sore from sobbing, she lay still and looked up at the ceiling. Reflected water from the moat bobbed, glowing, like a softly wobbling Tinkerbell among the curlicues of plaster.
From outside came the breath of the cedars starting to sop up the heat of another blazing day, something moving in the moat stirred up an exciting gassy smell, a whiff of crushed water-mint came into her nostrils, and after a while the smells of toast and chicory coffee from the kitchen.
As the sun rose, the room grew hotter and brighter and Sissy, cuddled among feathered bedclothes, began to sweat. Her mouth was still stale with sleep. She raised her arm and sniffed. The smell was strong, healthy, sour, and reassured her that she was still alive. Then, like a little exclamation of alarm, there came into her nostrils another smell, familiar, dangerous; the smell of burning.
She leapt up, went to the window and saw, perhaps two miles away, a puff of smoke, as though a giant lay in the field beyond the woods and smoked his pipe. But Sissy knew it was George.
She felt suddenly dizzy and had to clutch the sill. When the wave of faintness passed, she craned forwards into the garden and almost thought she could hear the sound of people screaming as they died burning. Then, from far away, she heard the first sound of the fire engine arriving, and suddenly felt shivery and weak but too dried up to cry any more.
When her sight cleared and her head stopped ringing, she went downstairs just as she was, her mood making her want to be sordid, have dirty teeth, knotted hair, drab clothes, still be smelling of sleep, as she came into the kitchen.
Elizabeth looked up as Sissy slumped into a chair, ‘Oh, my God, Sissy. How can you come down looking like that on a lovely day like this?’ making it seem as though it was all right to be filthy in bad weather.
Sissy did not answer but, slumping even lower, bit into toast with slack jaws so that crumbs fell over her nightie, eating loudly in a way she knew annoyed her mother.
‘You look very grim today,’ said Elizabeth, trying not to be too contentious after the good rapport she had developed yesterday but, all the same, feeling the anger of disappointment because Sissy had reverted to her former sullen state. ‘A real Lady Macbeth,’ she couldn’t resist adding, a little viciously.
Sissy said nothing. She was thinking about George, guiltily convinced that it was her fault he had gone fire raising this morning, for she was certain that was where he was. She had been unable to light the fire in George’s body last night because her own had felt so tender. He had begged her, nuzzling against her like a calf, but Sissy was trapped in a painful lethargy which, even this morning, was persisting.
If she had not been so tired she would have run across the fields to George’s smoke. When she found him she would have put her arms around his neck and drawn him after her into the woods. She would have taken off her knickers, then lain on the cool leaves of expired foxgloves and pulled George on top of her.
‘Don’t forget Myrtle is coming at twelve with the dress tacked,’ said Elizabeth.
Sissy surreptitiously raised her hand and touched her breast. It still hurt. She wondered if her nervous system had become exposed like a peeled rhubarb stalk so that it now smarted at the slightest touch. Otherwise why should she have had that intense reaction to Leo’s singing? And there had been the way she had cried this morning.
Sissy is infected with me and I can feel the universe. Anything prodded anywhere in the universe hurts me. Anything stirring in the cosmos tickles me. I twitch to the tickling of the toes of a mouse in Tibet.
There came a sudden sound of footsteps and the strong smell of scorch. And into the kitchen rushed George, his eyebrows burnt away, his face black, holes burnt in his clothes, and his breath coming fast.
‘The police are after me,’ he gasped.
Chapter 11
Martin, Mrs Lovage’s nephew, fighting the fire in the cottages at Bedham, had recognised him and shouted, ‘The Plague House boy!’
The firemen would have caught him in a moment, for the boy was short and puffed, and too afraid to be evasive, but, at the very moment of Martin’s shout, the door caved in and the firemen were too busy to even think of sneaking l
ittle arsonists from the big house of the next village.
‘Well, who would have thought it of a boy from a good family like that?’ said Martin to his aunt.
‘Me!’ cried Mrs Lovage, pulling on her coat.
‘And living in the biggest house in the village too,’ sighed Mrs Lovage’s nephew.
‘That boy’s got a mother who suffers constantly for her children,’ mourned Mrs Lovage, hurrying into outdoor clothes. ‘Though does she ever get a crumb of gratitude? Does she?’
Martin shook his head, brought up on tales of the bad children from the Plague House.
‘I hope your Shirl is as good a mother,’ said Mrs Lovage, knotting her headscarf. Then, with a sob in her throat, ‘This’ll break my lady’s heart,’ as she stuck her feet into her carpet slippers, which she would not normally have gone to the Plague House wearing under any circumstances, but this was an emergency.
‘Anyway, the police have been set on his trail and they’re probably at his mother’s house at this very moment,’ the fireman told her, helping her out with her bike.
‘The police!’ gasped Mrs Lovage. ‘Oh, my poor lady! You should have told me first so I could be there to console her.’
Mrs Lovage ripped her stockings getting astride. ‘When you think how I wrote a note for your teacher saying you had nits and couldn’t get to school the day you wanted to go to the football match, when your own mother wouldn’t do it for you. And now you can’t even let me know in advance that the police are after my poor lady, and you know how sensitive she is.’
‘But it wasn’t my responsibility, Auntie,’ wailed Martin.
‘You’re the one who identified him,’ accused Mrs Lovage, pedalling away.
She went through the village gasping with breathlessness and excitement, wisps of hair bursting from flying headscarf and stockings concertinaed, shouting to anyone she met on the way, ‘They’ve caught our George making a fire at last! He’ll be put into borstal for sure!’ She was jubilant. ‘I knew it was him!’
When she reached the Plague House, the police had already arrived. Mrs Lovage recognised their bikes at once, stern, chipped, and tall. She leant her own alongside and rushed into the house. The policemen were standing in the kitchen, fiddling nervously with their helmets. Elizabeth was sitting, looking frail but brave, at the breakfast table. Sissy was hunched among a litter of broken toast looking sulky. Mrs Lovage arrived like a rescuing army.
‘Well, well, whatever’s going on?’ she asked.
Elizabeth’s face lit up and she stretched out her arms like a drowning person begging for rescue. ‘Oh, thank God you’ve come, Mrs L. They say my son has set fire to a cottage but you can tell them that’s impossible.’
Mrs Lovage, after the briefest of pauses, said, ‘Of course, mum.’
‘I’m so upset.’ Elizabeth leant forwards and covered her eyes with her hands while the young policemen shuffled with embarrassment.
Elizabeth, her lips trembling, said, apparently irrelevantly, ‘My husband was shot down in the first month of the war, you know. I am a war widow.’
‘Oh,’ groaned the policemen.
Sissy sat unmoving, shoulders hunched, not any longer chewing, though she had marmalade round her mouth and tea splashings down the front of her nightie. Elizabeth tried studiously ignoring her, and hoped that the two policemen would not notice her either, for squalid Sissy, thought Elizabeth, looked like the sister of a pyromaniac.
‘You shouldn’t of come here troubling her about such foolishness,’ Mrs Lovage began to rage.
Elizabeth said swiftly to Sissy, keeping her voice low, talking out of the side of her mouth, accompanying her words with shooing gestures, ‘Don’t you think you ought to go and change, dear?’ The gleam in Elizabeth’s eye was hard.
Sissy gazed at her mother as though she had not heard.
Mrs Lovage was saying, ‘Can’t you see she’s not the sort of lady whose kid sets fire to things?’
‘If we might have a word with the young man, just to clear things up,’ one of the policemen said hesitantly.
Elizabeth sighed and slumped, causing Mrs Lovage to catch hold of her hand in a grip that was both meant to comfort and to support. Elizabeth shuddered at the rough touch and would have loved to withdraw her hand but dared not, with the policemen watching. She looked up murmuring, ‘Thank you for everything, Mrs L,’ as though she was on her death-bed.
‘Ah! Don’t take on so, mum,’ cried Mrs Lovage, terribly moved.
Sissy, dull-eyed before uneaten toast, suddenly seized it and sank her teeth into it. It crunched with the same sort of crumby explosion that had once, maybe, caused Mr Parson to wink his eye. The two policemen swung round, alarmed, at the sudden pop and Mrs Lovage scowled, feeling sure the whole thing was the girl’s fault. It always was.
‘I’ll go and get him,’ said Sissy through dry toast.
‘There’s a good girl,’ smiled one of the policemen. ‘He’s in no danger unless he’s been a bad boy.’
‘Which we are sure he’s not,’ said the other, looking fondly in the direction of Elizabeth, ‘Seeing as what a good home he’s got.’
Elizabeth, feeling somewhat braced by these words, bestowed a beautiful and grateful smile on the young man.
Sissy rose, still chewing, screeching her chair legs back on the flagstones in just the way that Elizabeth hated.
When she opened the attic bedroom door, she was instantly overwhelmed by the smell of burning and saw George cower in the darkest corner, sucking his thumb as though he was three instead of thirteen.
‘I didn’t do it, Sis! I didn’t! I didn’t! I didn’t!’ he whimpered, cringing.
‘Come out and tell them, then,’ urged Sissy.
‘I’ll run away. I’ll jump out of the window,’ wept George.
‘They’ll catch you, George. You’re only a little boy and they’re big men. You haven’t a chance.’
‘I’ll kill myself!’ cried George. ‘I’ll throw myself into the moat and drown!’
‘Now you sound just like Mummy,’ said Sissy contemptuously.
Eventually, after much persuasion, George scrambled cautiously out, covered in cobwebs, Sissy whispering, ‘I’ll be at your side.’
Halfway downstairs, George stopped suddenly and said, ‘Suppose they put me in prison, Sis.’
‘I thought you said you didn’t do it,’ she retorted.
‘Well, they might not believe me,’ he whined.
‘Then you’ll just have to persuade them you didn’t do it. Like you have me,’ said Sissy drily.
They went on down in silence for a while, then George stopped suddenly, as though he had just thought of something, and yelped, ‘They might hang me, Sissy.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Sissy, giving him a tug. ‘They don’t hang children any longer. That stopped a hundred years ago.’
But at the sight of the policemen he stopped, jerked back out of Sissy’s grasp, and, with a gagging sound, backed violently into the hall.
The policemen shot off after him, catching him in the middle of the hall, and it was as though they forgot that they were adult men and George a child, for there followed a short struggle in which the boy disappeared entirely under the bulk of the two men, and Sissy thought they must be crushing George to death. When they straightened, they had George by either elbow. His burnt shirt was up to his shoulders, his face scarlet, his singed hair wild, his nose running, and he was crying with his mouth open. Keeping him a little too high, so that his toes only barely brushed the ground and he hung looking like a long bolster drying on a too-low washing line, they frogmarched him back towards the kitchen.
Elizabeth had not stirred. It was one of those situations she would have liked to have pretended was not happening. She sat, her gaze vague, trying to keep her attention on the thrush singing in the garden and the butterflies that hovered over the hogweed in the yard.
Suddenly George screamed, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Help me!’
A great shudder winced thr
ough Elizabeth and, gripping the sides of the table, she began to push herself up, and then she let her head sink and could go no further, for her limbs had become numb like her mind. There she stayed, swaying a little, half-up half-down, a tiny groaning sensation stirring in her throat.
George’s shout had made the hairs on Sissy’s scalp prickle and the blood drain from her face. She would never forgive George, she realised.
George, having yelled out, peered through the kitchen doorway, to where he could see his mother swaying.
There came a long long silence during which George dangled between the two policemen, who stood hesitantly.
Then, after ages, it seemed as though George understood that his mother was not going to save him.
He turned his head, looked straight into Sissy’s eyes with his own gaze wide with honesty and frankness, and said the thing that made Sissy forgive him utterly.
In a croaky little voice that was as dry as the cobwebs he had hid among, he said, ‘I got so flustered that I called you “Mummy” by mistake, Sis. And I wish you were.’
That was the moment Sissy lunged, whacking the policemen in the belly with her fists and screaming, ‘You filthy bullies! You’rejust like Hitler!’
The policemen, taken by surprise, staggered, loosening their grip on George’s elbows. He was running even before Sissy had time to tell him, ‘Make a dash for it, Georgie!’
Mrs Lovage made a grab as he dived through her legs, but missed him. Turning to Sissy, she said, ‘You’ll get done for aiding a criminal to escape from the police, my girl,’ and Sissy put her hands on her hips and laughed sneeringly.
In a wiggle of battered legs and dirty knees George was gone through the open window. The policemen leant out of the window and watched as he plunged through the cow-parsley.
One of the policemen said, ‘We’ll leave it now, but we can get him whenever we want to.’
Sissy rushed for George the moment the police were gone, dashing over the yard, dust rising under her pounding sandals. As she approached the yard, she heard the bolts of the stable door shut.
Left alone in the kitchen, Mrs Lovage lit two cigarettes with one match and placed one between Elizabeth’s lips. ‘You’ll be ever so much better without him, ducky.’