He nodded. ‘It’s twelfth night and I am finished here,’ he said. ‘Maybe another year.’
He walked out into the little hall and grasped the tree like a dancer, around its supple waist. A shower of needles pattered down, but neither Eleanor nor Robin minded.
‘We’ve got so accustomed to you being here …’ Robin began.
‘You know how to cook now,’ Uncle Nicholas observed.
‘Oh yes.’
‘And you have a proper fire …’
‘Yes, but …’
‘And you are starting to sculpt again, and you …’ Uncle Nicholas turned with a sweet smile to Eleanor. ‘You’re going to find you have plenty to do.’
‘You needn’t go,’ Eleanor said. ‘Robin’s mother comes back to England this week, why not stay with us till then?’
The tree swayed as he lifted it from the pot. Robin held the door. ‘Happy New Year!’ the voice came from the centre of the tree. ‘A Happy New Year to all of you, dear children.’
The tree brushed through the doorway, and they watched him carry it down the stairs, shedding a scented trail of green. Then the door below banged, and he was gone.
The telephone in the flat was ringing. It was Robin’s mother, she had come home early.
‘Oh, you’ve just missed him!’ Eleanor exclaimed in disappointment. ‘And we have had such a strange time. Robin is sculpting again, and we think we may have to move house to find a studio for him, perhaps in the country … we have an open fire, and it has been so lovely! Robin has learned to cook, we had turkey this Christmas! Think of that! And I … I …’ She broke off, she could not think of words to describe the odd sensations she was feeling: a queasiness like travel sickness, a tenderness at her breasts, a tendency to weep, a soaring inexplicable joy …
‘Missed who?’ Robin’s mother demanded.
‘Uncle Nicholas!’ Eleanor said. ‘Your cousin. He was here for Christmas.’
‘I don’t have a cousin Nicholas,’ Robin’s mother said.
Catching the Bus
Jim was going to go to the Grammar. My mum had set her heart on it even though Dad warned her that Jim wasn’t all that bright. She started saving for the uniform when he was nine, she said he’d need books and a satchel and a table and chair in his room to do his homework, and Stuart would have to go out and play while the homework was being done, and changes would have to be made. And my dad said: ‘Don’t set your heart on it, Maggs.’ And my dad was right.
Jim failed his eleven plus, but all he wanted to do anyway was to go as an apprentice at Filton and build aeroplanes, and they would take him with a good report from the Secondary Modern; so he was happy. But then Mum kept the Uniform Savings Fund going because she had hopes that Stuart might suddenly change and not be football-mad and darts-mad any more, but be the one to put on the dark grey trousers and dark green blazer and go the other way to school – across the park and down the hill and all the way down to the Colston Road to catch the bus up to the Grammar instead of the Secondary Modern where everyone else went.
Stu didn’t change and Dad said: ‘That little nest egg of yours could put a new roof on the kitchen, Maggs. Shame to let it sit there.’
We had a kitchen which was just a little room out the back. It leaned against the house almost like a shed, and you went down a step to it and then from the kitchen into the back yard. It had a corrugated iron roof and when it rained it sounded like a marching band drumming. It leaked. That was why Dad wanted the Uniform Savings Fund for a new roof. When the rain came from the east it blew in, and set a little trickle of rusty red water running down the kitchen wall.
But Mum said: ‘There’s still our Lizzie.’ And Dad said: ‘What does a girl want to go to the Grammar for?’ and Stu and Jim snorted with laughter and Mum said nothing.
But she didn’t use the Uniform Fund for a new roof.
I was ten then; and I was bright. ‘There’s no point sending a girl to the Grammar,’ Dad said to Mum very reasonably as he bolted the front door and she started slowly climbing the stairs to bed. I was in my room, torch quickly switched off, book hidden, pretending to be asleep. I was reading Great Expectations, which is about someone called Pip who is actually a boy, though I thought it was a girl’s name.
‘She’ll get married and then it’s all wasted,’ Dad said as they went past my door. ‘It’s not as if she’s going to do anything with it.’
Their bedroom door closed and I heard him moving around: the groan of the wooden wardrobe door opening and the jangle of the coathangers. Mum didn’t reply. I heard the bed creak as they got in, and then the click of their light going off, plunging the house into comfortable dark. Then I switched on my torch again and turned the page.
Dad worked as a mechanic in a small garage on the main road. Mum did ironing. She said she’d never take in washing, she’d be ashamed to take in washing; but she could do ironing with her head held high. She said she liked it; but I saw her face when a washbasket piled high with shirts was waiting and she would bang the ironing board down on its legs and then heave it up to make it click into place at the right height. She had an electric iron with a green light in the black Bakelite handle which glowed as the iron warmed up, like an evil eye, keeping her on her feet when she was tired, making her bend over the board until late at night. The Bakelite was shiny and glossy on the back, black like the main road when it is wet. But around the green eye it was cracked and pale.
She had a special jug that I had made her in Art, and she filled it with cold water and dipped her fingertips in it and flicked them out over the white linens and creased cottons, and when the iron went over a fat resilient drop it hissed like a snake. The house was always filled with the warm scent of hot clean cloth, and one or other of Mum’s hands was always stained with a little stripe of red where she had brushed against the iron and burned herself.
When I was tall enough to reach the board at its lowest setting I was allowed to do the handkerchiefs. First you went round the edges, the iron nosing its way round like a blunt-nosed explorer. Then you did the broad sweep of the middle, that was the best bit. Then you folded it in half and pressed the crease in the middle, then in a quarter and pressed down the quarter line. Big men’s handkerchiefs went into three folds before they were halved.
‘I love ironing,’ I said to my mum.
‘You wouldn’t say that if it was all you could do,’ she said.
I passed my eleven plus. ‘I don’t see that it makes any difference,’ my dad said. ‘What’s she going to do with GCEs when she’s married and with a baby on the way?’
‘We’d have sent the boys,’ Mum said.
‘Boys need exams,’ my dad replied inarguably. ‘What does she want French for?’
My mum put down her iron, sitting it on its back on the board. The little green eye winked on as she looked across the room at my dad, eating his tea at the table. ‘I’ve set my heart on it, Arthur,’ she said. ‘I’ve set my heart on it.’
Nobody asked me. They told me at school that I was a lucky lucky girl. But I didn’t feel very lucky at home. When we had Sunday’s roast beef in mince on Monday and then in sandwiches on Tuesday and then the bone boiled up for soup on Wednesday it was my fault, because I was going to the Grammar and shoes had to be paid for. The Uniform Savings Fund bought the blazer and the tie from the school’s own second-hand stall, but there was still the PE kit and a special shoe bag to buy, and I needed a satchel and a felt hat with an elastic strap, and a hat badge in dark green enamel with the school crest on it.
Dad started to come home early on Friday nights and didn’t have his pint any more. And then one day a big canvas holdall appeared in the hall, filled with a stranger’s dirty laundry, and I knew my mum was taking in washing.
She bought a twin tub on the Never Never and it lived in the middle of the kitchen with one hose pipe attached to the tap pouring cold water in, and the waste pipe looped out over the sink pouring dirty water out. If you opened the lid when the
washing was doing you could see the whole drum turning and shaking like some wild grey stew. There was a wringer fixed on the top and I turned the handle while Mum fed the clothes through the rollers before dropping them into the spin dryer. When the spinner was on, the whole thing juddered across the uneven kitchen floor as if it would run out into the back yard taking the damned washing with it. Then, when it had spun so long that the house had been half shaken to pieces, she opened the lid, heaved out the long ropes of laundry, and hung them out to dry on the rows and rows of new lines which my dad had put up in the back yard. Then she had to iron it, as well as the usual load.
The family chipped in. One of my aunts found a school satchel from somewhere, gave it a polish and presented it to me in August with a half a crown in the inside pocket. My Uncle Peter made me a wooden pencil case with my name in pokerwork on the inside. I was really pleased with that. My mum’s uncle in Canada sent a postal order and that paid for the special games shorts and the daps. One by one the things were bought and put into the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers in my bedroom.
But there was always something more. I had to have special name tags. It wasn’t enough to write your name inside things. They were specially embroidered name tags and they were three and six for a hundred.
‘Three and six?’ my dad said.
Mum nodded grimly, and bashed the iron down on somebody’s collar.
It was my job to sew the name tags into my new clothes. It was my job to fold them and lay them carefully in the precious bottom drawer. It was my job, all through that summer, to tick off one item after another from the list the school had sent us, until it was the end of August, nearly the start of the new term, and the drawer was full.
‘I only hope she’s worth it,’ my nan said to my dad. ‘Seeing what it costs.’
My dad scowled. He never agreed out loud with my nan when she said something against my mum. But he had a special scowl and she knew what it meant.
‘Throwing good money away on educating a girl,’ my nan said. ‘What’s she going to do with O levels? That’s what I’d like to know.’
My mum suddenly appeared in the kitchen doorway. It was Sunday afternoon when my nan always came over for tea, and the ironing board was away for once and the twin tub pushed out into the yard. My mum was slicing bread and she had the bread knife in her hand as if she was Macbeth.
‘She’s going to have a chance,’ she said. ‘She’s going to have her chance. She’s as good as any boy, and she’s got more in her head than Jim or Stu. They’d have had their chance if they’d passed the eleven plus, so she gets hers. And I don’t know what she’ll do with it, not French, or Maths, or Biology, or any of the things she’s going to learn. I don’t know what she’ll do with O levels. But it’s a step for her. It’s the bus out of here for her. It’s her chance.’
There was a dreadful long silence. Mum had never said a word to Nan in twenty years of nagging. She’d never said anything even to suggest that she thought there was anything more than ironing, and the row after row of houses all the same, and Sunday tea with Nan every Sunday, and a week at Minehead in the summer. She never said why she wanted one of us to go to the Grammar, and why she wanted it so much. She wasn’t a woman who talked a lot. She wasn’t a woman who burst out into explanations. She wasn’t like someone in a book who is always explaining things, and feeling things, and saying some more. She just stood there with the bread knife in her hand, looking at Dad and Nan who looked back at her, and then she said: ‘Tea in five minutes, lay the table, Lizzie.’
And I laid the table for tea while Stu and Jim and Nan and Dad sat in silence, maybe thinking about Mum holding the bread knife and suddenly saying that her daughter had to have a chance.
On Monday September 4th my shirt was clean and stiff at the neck. My tie was silky under my fingers. My blazer with the badge I had sewed on the pocket and my name tag I had sewed on the collar felt cool when I put my arms in the sleeves; that was the silky lining. My hat felt loose on my head, and the elastic strap was tight at my throat. My shoes shone like horse chestnuts, my satchel swung from my shoulder, empty of everything but my new pencil case and a purse, a special purse, even the purse had to be special: it was the school purse with a little zip and a strap you wore over one shoulder, with my bus fare inside. Because I wasn’t going to the Secondary Modern within walking distance, on the other side of the park. I was going down to the Colston Road to catch the bus to the Grammar on the other side of the town.
My mum walked with me to the bus stop. She said she had run out of blue bag and she might as well get it now as later, and then she said she might as well wait with me for the bus to come. So she was there when I stood in the queue and waited for the green double decker bus to come round the corner, leaning as if it might fall over. And we didn’t say anything, either of us, because there was nothing to say, now that I was there at last, at the bus stop, waiting for my bus.
My mum held her arms across herself, as if she were hugging herself in. Her hands were red from washing now, the fingernails and the cuticles white and soft from the hot water. She didn’t reach out and tweak at my new blazer, or straighten my hat. She stood back a little, as if she just wanted to watch me go.
The bus came round the corner and the queue shuffled as it drew up. The conductor was standing at the foot of the stairs, his ticket machine resting on his stomach, his finger ready to press the bell. I glanced back at my mum and she was beaming at me, her face filled with delight as if it were the start of the summer holiday or Christmas morning. But her arms were held tight across her, as if she were hugging a baby which wasn’t there.
I turned to the bus and I grabbed the pole and I jumped on to the step and I went inside and I found a seat on the scratchy seats with the zig-zag patterns and I waved at her through the dusty window.
And then I set off to get my chance.
About the Author
Philippa Gregory is an internationally renowned author of historical novels. She holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Edinburgh. Works that have been adapted for television include A Respectable Trade, The Other Boleyn Girl and The Queen’s Fool. The Other Boleyn Girl is now a major film, starring Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Eric Bana. Philippa Gregory lives in the North of England with her family.
Also by the Author
The Tudor Court Series
THE CONSTANT PRINCESS
THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL
THE BOLEYN INHERITANCE
THE QUEEN’S FOOL
THE VIRGIN’S LOVER
THE OTHER QUEEN
The Wideacre Trilogy
WIDEACRE
THE FAVOURED CHILD
MERIDON
Earthly Joys
EARTHLY JOYS
VIRGIN EARTH
The Cousins’ War
THE LADY OF THE RIVERS
THE WHITE QUEEN
THE RED QUEEN
THE KINGMAKER’S DAUGHTER
THE WHITE PRINCESS
Standalones
PERFECTLY CORRECT
ALICE HARTLEY’S HAPPINESS
A RESPECTABLE TRADE
THE WISE WOMAN
FALLEN SKIES
THE LITTLE HOUSE
ZELDA’S CUT
Short Stories
BREAD AND CHOCOLATE
Copyright
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
This collection copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 2000
Individual stories © Philippa Gregory Ltd 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000
Some of these stories, in slightly different versions, have appeared in the following publications: Living, Woman’s Weekly, You Magazine, Woman & Home, Candis and Good Food Magazine
Philippa Gregory assert
s the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780002257649
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007404506
Version: 2013–09–04
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