by Sara Banerji
‘Perhaps there’s a substance in German bombs called Hitler’s Potty Powder, or something that makes people mad,’ speculated George.
‘Perhaps Mrs Lovage has been affected by Hitler’s Potty Powder too,’ suggested Sissy. ‘And that’s why she got so cross about me getting fat.’
After lunch, while Sissy sat in front of the mirror, trying out hairstyles, George dropped into a doze of boredom. He dreamt that Sissy walked on the stretched-out rubber of a burst balloon over an infinite ocean of Hitler’s Potty Powder. She stepped with care, yet George knew that she was certain to puncture the fragile rubber and sink into the fatal madness mixture which would change her nature and cause her to stop loving him.
When he was little he had once watched Elizabeth put on her earrings and had thought he saw the whole world reflected in miniature in the diamond’s gleaming. Then the earring slipped from Elizabeth’s fingers and vanished into her open box of face powder.
Elizabeth had been smiling as she surveyed her reflection in the mirror but when she dropped the jewel her expression instantly became petulant and anxious so that George felt as though everything was lost, not only the world which had shrunk into the jewel, but his mother’s happiness as well.
He had stared with growing horror as his mother, letting out little weeping moans of frustration, dug into the deep pink perfumed depths with the handle of her comb, and, at last, like a corpse being exhumed, drew the jewel back into existence again.
When George saw that the diamond had lost all its sparkle he began to scream.
‘Oh, don’t be silly, it’s just covered with powder,’ his mother had snapped, and she had wiped the powder away with her fingers before inserting the jewel back into her earlobe.
Ever after, George had had a horror of soft powders and had spoiled the fun of the rest of the family at the seaside because of his fear of the sand, which, he thought, would creep up and engulf him. But Hitler’s Potty Powder would be worse than that, worse even than that creeping white persecutor, icing sugar.
‘I dreamt about you betraying me,’ said George, rousing himself and glaring at Sissy.
She gasped, and rushing out shouted: ‘You’ve got depressed because you haven’t got anything to do.’
She returned a few minutes later with paints, pieces of cloth left over from her dress, a handful of tangled yellow silk stolen from Elizabeth, and a dead frog she had found last summer.
It had been lying, hard and leathery, its belly blown up in its last hour of malleability, its limbs outstretched like a sacrificed victim, on the gravel of the drive. Sissy, fascinated with its dessicated perfection, had swept it up as though it was a jewel, and had kept it, treasure-like, among her knickers ever since.
George had craved for the frog, at the time, but now only asked sulkily, ‘What do you expect me to do with all this stuff?’
‘I thought you could dress the frog. And paint its face,’ suggested Sissy, as she retreated down the attic stairs. She sounded almost nervous for she knew she had already betrayed George. She had not told him the police were no longer hunting him.
A few hours later, George became certain that his mother had succumbed to Hitler’s Potty Powder for, from his attic hiding place, he heard her call, ‘George? George? I am going to give you your father’s clothes to wear.’
Terror overwhelmed George.
‘Ties! Lambswool sweaters!’ called Elizabeth from below, while George moved swiftly and silently into ever more hidden attics.
Elizabeth, her tone gradually losing its cheerful note and taking on one of irritability, cried out, ‘Surely you would like to wear a silk bow-tie with little spots on?’
George, to whom nothing like this had ever happened before, crouched among old leather trunks that smelled of hide and mothballs and felt his heart beating.
At last Elizabeth’s footsteps died away and totally unnerved, George crept down all the flights of stairs searching for Sissy.
He could not find her, and in the end hid, shuddering, inside the broom cupboard that adjoined the kitchen. From here, stifling among the smells of paraffin polish, broom whiskers and grey dust, he could hear the voices of his mother and Mrs Lovage.
Listening keenly for sounds that might betray the presence of police – sips or slurps or grunts or satisfied guffaws – the sort of sound that gracious people like Elizabeth and genteel ones like Mrs Lovage would never make, he heard his mother say, ‘What’s the matter with George?’
‘I expect he got a shock at being accused of firelighting,’ said Mrs Lovage. ‘But now he knows the real culprit has been caught he’ll calm down.’
‘He might not know. That’s it. That’s why he’s lurking.’ There were chair-scuffling sounds, footsteps moving briskly.
‘Sissy knew,’ said Mrs Lovage. ‘She’ll have told George.’ And that was how George discovered that Sissy had kept him hiding when she knew there was no need.
*
After Sissy left George she went into the garden and, looking out of the front gate, saw Bruno go by. With a surge of excitement, she decided to follow him.
He led her to the potato field where Sissy saw, from a hiding place in the hedge, other Italian prisoners as well as some gipsy women prepare to gather the newly dug crop.
One of the gipsy girls, as Bruno passed, reached out her hand and caressed him across his thighs. Sissy heard him let out a soft deep laugh as he bent over his row and started picking.
A sudden inexplicable shiver passed through Sissy’s body.
She had run all this way, excited, not knowing what she was going to do when she got here, but sure that something amazing was going to happen. For she knew now—because of the Nymph Quilt, because of Mr Parson, and because of George – what Bruno had been going to do in the stable.
If the Italian prisoner had, at that moment, ordered Sissy to take off her knickers, lie down among the docks and sorrel, and be fucked, she knew she would have done it.
But it was the gipsy girl, not Sissy, that Bruno took into the leafy ditch. It was the gipsy who took off her knickers. It was the gipsy who was fucked by Bruno.
When she got home Sissy, shivering, hardly glanced at George, did not notice the white face, tight mouth, scowling eyes. She did not even see that he was dressed in a dark neat man’s suit, complete with a waistcoat, maroon spotted handkerchief in the breast pocket, tie, and white turned-down collar.
‘You’ve got to take them off or they’ll get spoiled before the party,’ Elizabeth had begged.
‘I won’t put them on again if I have to take them off,’ George had threatened in a new dark voice.
Perhaps if Sissy had noticed and cried out on her return, ‘How smart!’ George might have softened in his furious resolve, but little collapsible George went unnoticed because Sissy was consumed with furious regret.
*
‘You and your brother are like a couple sicked up by the cat,’ sneered Mrs Lovage.
Elizabeth, lacquering her nails, cried, without looking up so that the perfect gloss would not be blurred, ‘My God, Sissy, what a mess you are in! It’s only an hour till the guests come! Hurry up and start getting ready!’
‘Guests?’ mumbled Sissy vaguely.
Elizabeth sprang to her feet, upsetting the bottle. Stemming the leaking scarlet tide with her fingers, shaking with misery and despair, filling the room with the smell of acetone, she said, ‘It’s too much! It’s too awful! How can I bear it! I wish I hadn’t let you come now! I do really so so wish it!’
Sissy went up to the attic to get her brush and gave a yell of shock, imagining she saw a teeny glaring person. Then she realised that it was the dessicated frog that she had given George to decorate and dress. She picked it up and saw George had made it a dress that stretched tight over its bulging belly. The frog’s pasty face now had fat and haughty lips and pale, bulbous eyes. George, whose huge fumbling fingers had not been able to insert a matchstick into a conker had succeeded in manipulating these tiny pieces of was
te chiffon, silver sequins, and silk thread, to create, Sissy saw with a little creep of horror, a parody of herself.
Or me. The frog in a blue dress looks rather like my foetal self at the moment, in fact, though I expect to improve immensely in the months ahead.
Chapter 14
The guests had arrived, George had taken their coats, the dinner was to be served soon.
‘That’s for the clear soup,’ Mrs Lovage protested as Myrtle, at the kitchen table – redfaced, slumped – poured herself a glass of sherry. ‘You’re getting drunk. And you’re not supposed to drink it from a tumbler.’
‘I’ll drink as much as I like, seeing as how it’s me that’s got every single thing … Hup!’ The hiccup was so sudden and strong it made her splutter.
‘Oh Lord,’ cried Mrs Lovage in hopeless dismay.
Sissy, coming down the stairs in her new dress, saw George in the hall and thought for a moment that it was her father standing there.
‘Oh George! You look
He waited. If she had said the right thing in that moment everything would have been all right.
‘… like a butler,’ she laughed, impressed, but not daring to let him know, in case he developed a taste for being drawn into her mother’s service.
He turned his face away from her and said, ‘The drawing-room is this way,’ to the guests.
‘You creep,’ whispered Sissy.
George gazed at her coldly.
Sissy felt afraid. Earlier, she had taken her dress from the bed and under it found the charred remains of the dressed-up frog. She had rushed downstairs, shocked, knowing George was warning her, and then realised that, in her hurry to get away, she had forgotten to put her knickers on.
Knickers, and the anxious feeling that the burnt frog had provoked, were forgotten as she went into the dining-room and saw the glowing candles, starched linen, sparkling crystal, polished silver.
Sissy managed to choke back a spontaneous shout of joy, then, thinking she might have appeared childish and easily impressed, she glanced swiftly round trying to see a fault so that she could display her sophistication.
‘There is a fingerprint on the butter dish,’ she pronounced as she sat down.
‘Oh,’ moaned Elizabeth, red with mortification, and felt fruitlessly about under the table for her daughter’s foot so that she could kick it.
‘It must have been our charlady,’ said Sissy, turning to the guest on her right, an intense, serious young airman, James, with dark hollow eyes and a nervous way of fiddling with his cutlery. ‘Mrs Lovage always has such greasy hands.’
Mrs Lovage, smiling on the success of her table, let out a choking gasp of indignation and screwed her apron in her fists as though it was a throat being wrung, while the guests glanced anxiously at their cutlery.
On Sissy’s left sat freckled Billy who acted pompously to counteract the youthful impression of his looks.
On one side of Elizabeth was the handsome florid padre, Barney, whose bright shirt and racy tie displayed a desire to appear secular, and, on the other, a red-faced wing commander, ‘Call me “Terence”, dear, dear, lady.’
On either side of George were Lewis, tall, tough, insensitive, and Robert who had wanted to be an airman since he was a child, and, at the end of the table, Charles, a bespectacled young man, immaculately turned out, impeccably spoken, and wonderfully well-mannered, who Tim had once called, ‘A bit of a prig’
All of them gasped and appeared delightedly startled by the sight of plump blonde Sissy in her soft blue dress.
‘I think you know my daughter, Sissy,’ Elizabeth announced. And using the single weapon she still possessed, added firmly, ‘She’s thirteen, so she’s being allowed to stay up late.’
The young men looked guiltily away.
‘Ah, sweet,’ murmured James, and Billy said, ‘Will you have a bun, dear?’ holding out the bread rolls.
Elizabeth turned to Terence, who, as he became rapidly drunk seemed to be shrinking as though melting into his chair, and said apparently irrelevantly, ‘Children give such joy but no one can cause more hurt than one’s child.’ She raised her hand to her breast and let her voice tail away as though recalling unspeakable suffering. After a moment, pulling herself courageously together, she asked, ‘Do you have children, Wing Commander? – Terence?’
‘Terry – please,’ muttered the wing commander, deeply moved, pulling out photos. ‘This is my lad. Just like me they all say …’
Sissy murmured confidentially to James, ‘My mother always tells people I am thirteen because she likes to be thought younger than her true age. Poor thing.’
James sat upright hopefully, and his sad eyes looked a little less despairing. ‘Oh, you mean she just tells people you’re thirteen … when you are really –?’
‘She’ll say anything,’ said Sissy with dark ambiguity. ‘Women have to when they reach a certain age …’ and flicked her eyes in Elizabeth’s direction, half hoping and half dreading that her mother had heard.
Beattie entered suddenly, looking even wilder eyed and haired than usual, an equine odour preceding her.
‘How charming you look, Sissy,’ she cried warmly. ‘All dressed up like a real grown-up lady. Oh, I know this material! Tim brought it …’ She didn’t finish the sentence, but stood for a moment, face flushed, eyes distant, as though remembering something.
‘My aunt is horsy, and inclined to grooming inspections,’ said Sissy.
There was an appreciative roar of laughter, in which Beattie joined, at this rather mild witticism. The young men were exhausted from being frightened and Sissy’s childish rudeness rested them.
‘Sorry, dear. Did I embarrass you?’ Beattie apologised, and to George, filling glasses, ‘Lots of that, darling. Up to the brim. My goodness you look spruced up.’
The way the grown-up men paid attention to Sissy began to heal the scalding sensation that had been in her heart ever since she saw the Italian prisoner lie down among the trees with the gipsy. She began to feel excited and think that that unique something that had stirred her in the Italian prisoner might be roused by these other men as well.
George stooped over her shoulders murmuring in a deadpan voice, ‘Wine for you, Sissy?’
‘Thank you, George. Dear,’ Sissy whispered, letting her fingers linger brushingly against his wrist.
‘Your younger brother?’ inquired Robert. ‘He looks a lot like you, Sissy,’ then smiled patronisingly at George.
George drew his wrist quickly away from Sissy, suddenly disliking her touch. Sissy had betrayed him yet again by her silence, and anger stopped him explaining, ‘No. We are twins. The only reason that Sissy is taller than me is because she is having a pre-pubertal spurt.’
When he sat down at his place, his humiliation was increased for he found himself much lower than Robert and Lewis who talked over his head as though he was not there. He wondered if Mrs Lovage had purposely given him an extra low chair to show him up, and he tried to maintain a half-standing posture so that his shoulders were on a level with his companions. When he was thus agonisingly arranged, he took his first cautious sip of soup but it fell back into the plate, splashing his tie.
George knew that his elbows and knees would not be able to endure the strain for long. When they gave way and he had to sink down into his seat, Sissy would realise that he was much shorter than the other men and her scorn for him, already manifested in the way she had lied to him, would increase. Even now, he knew she was thinking how cultured the others were compared to him as their soup slipped effortlessly past their moustaches, while they, without appearing to give the troublesome substance any thought at all, chatted happily to Beattie, admiringly to their hostess, or in conspiratorial whispers to Sissy.
For a while it seemed as though no one was going to talk to George at all. And then when someone did, George wished he hadn’t.
‘Why don’t you sit down, old chap?’ asked Lewis. ‘It looks awfully uncomfy like that.’
‘I am
sitting down!’ asserted George desperately and took another spoonful to prove the point, still keeping his weight on his elbows and not allowing his knees to buckle.
George was getting on Sissy’s nerves, for she felt he was lacking the one virtue she really admired, dignity; then she caught a glimpse of his eyes and was surprised to see anguish in them. Usually she knew exactly what George was feeling, for his emotions always gushed out like unstoppered ginger beer the moment they were alone together, but today she had hardly talked to George at all. She became suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to tell him it did not matter if he was short and plump and messy, for she loved him better than anybody, in spite of those things.
George had put the bottle, still wrapped in its napkin, on the table.
‘It looks like a penis,’ said Sissy to herself, delighted. She has only recently learnt the word.
Billy said something.
‘What?’
‘How many pennies for your thoughts?’ he repeated.
The word ‘pennies’, coming so soon after the comparison with the bottle, made Sissy giggle aloud. Spluttering, she stared at the young man’s napkin-covered lap. ‘His penis has probably got freckles too,’ she decided, charmed.
Billy, following her gaze, went red, began to fiddle with his napkin, and did not repeat his question.
Dishes came and went. Myrtle, growing ever redder, stumbled round the table, dropping handfuls of cutlery then laughing loudly. In her wake, Mrs Lovage scuttled, trying to minimise the damage.
The wing commander, Terence, moistly melted till he was almost out of sight.
Barney, warmed by the graciousness of Elizabeth’s smile and her softly whispered ‘More? Would you care for some more?’, made plans for increased secularisation.
It was green asparagus from Mr Lovage’s garden that Elizabeth was offering.
‘Dip it in the melted butter. It’s not often one can indulge in such things during war-time,’ she advised Barney lusciously, then rounded her soft red mouth and sucked the glossy dripping vegetable in.