The Wolf in the Attic

by Paul Kearney

  Those Committee members who have turned up do so with grim and angry faces. I catch them looking at me over the grave, and can’t understand why they seem so hostile. When Miss Hawcross tries to talk to them most turn their backs on her at once and walk away. It makes me wonder why they turned up at all. Only Mrs Gallianikos meets my eyes, and she smiles a little, and when she is leaving she touches me on the arm and says something in Greek I do not understand, but to Miss Hawcross she is as frosty as the morning.

  I think Pa did something wrong before he died. Maybe it was his investments – he would talk about them from time to time as though they were vegetables in a garden. They would be thriving and blooming all the time. I was not entirely sure what that meant, but we still lived on bread and dripping for a week of every month, and it seems even to me that something was wrong about that.

  I think he may have mislaid some of the money that the Committee entrusted him with, and they cannot forgive him for it. That is why the Greeks would not let us have the service at their church. He should have stayed there the night before the funeral, with the coffin open so everyone could see his face and say goodbye. The Trisagion, they call it.

  But instead he ended up in the pauper’s corner of a country which was not his own, with the black ground stone-hard in the frost, and not a patch of blue to be seen in the sky above.

  BACK AT THE house, I go up to my room at once; for Mr Bristol is here, sitting in the front room as if he owns the place – well, I suppose he does – but it seems he is here nearly all the time now.

  He and Miss Hawcross have taken to sitting in the front room, which is the only place a fire is ever lit, and they talk endlessly together, and once or twice the Inspector in the trench-coat has joined them. Because the file is still open I suppose. Whatever he has to say, it is nothing which has reached me. I talk more to Pie than anyone else, and if they had caught Pa’s murderer, I’m sure they would let me know.

  The strange thing is that I don’t greatly care. It as if my head has been wrapped in black wool, and everything is at a distance. After Pa’s funeral I feel like something inside me has changed, changed in quite a huge way. It began with meeting the Romani in the wood, and placing the holly on the coffin set the seal upon it. But I cannot say what it is.

  I do have this sense of premonition. The world has been turned upside down, but the turning has not finished yet. New Year is coming, and I cannot help but feel that with the new decade everything I have known will melt away.

  They are discussing me, down in that front room. I will be twelve in a few days, but I am still a child to them, and so they close the door on me and the murmuring goes on behind it.

  I go and sit in the study when that happens, and look at the bare shelves where Pa had his books, and the empty tobacco jar – even his pipes are gone. I set my hand on the bare boards where he lay – they took the carpet away – and I try so hard to imagine him walking through the door. He would have Mr Bristol out on his ear in a second, and would bark an order at Miss Hawcross which would leave her fluttering like a frightened pigeon.

  And I cry, when I know they are not watching and cannot hear me. It is all right to cry when your father dies. It is not childish at all. I bite my own arm so I do not make too much noise, and hug Pie until she creaks.

  IT IS NOT right or genteel to eavesdrop, but no-one tells me what is right and wrong any more and I have decided that gentility is not for me. So when I hear the voices in the front room rise louder I cross the hall quietly, raise a finger to my lips at Pie, and carefully lay my ear against the door.

  ‘– out by the end of the month.’ It is Mr Bristol. I can just imagine his sharp-angled face, and the way his pale eyes turn into slits under his bowler when he is agitated.

  ‘This is charity now, nothing less, and charity is not something that sits well with me when I am doling it out to the thieves that robbed me. Near two months rent I am owed, Miss Hawcross, and the house is sitting empty when I could have half a dozen lodgers in it. It’s nonsensical, is what it is. The girl must go. I give her until New Year.’

  ‘Surely you could let her have just one room Mr Bristol,’ Miss Hawcross says, so quiet I have to strain to make out the words.

  ‘That won’t work. She’s a child. She can’t stay here on her own. There’s no-one to look after her, and I know you have done your bit too, more than anyone maybe. But you got a job to keep too Miss Hawcross, and I know for a fact he didn’t pay you since halfway through November. Charity, that’s what it is, and it isn’t our place. The girl is not our responsibility. You’ll back me up here Inspector.’

  A new voice. It is the policeman in the trench-coat. I can smell his cigarette through the door.

  ‘She’s a ward of the state, legally speaking Mr Bristol. We’ve been able to trace no living relatives, and the Greek community here have washed their hands of the matter. Francis took them to the cleaners. First there was the pyramid scheme, then the shares in the steamship company that never was. He had them eating out of his hand – apparently he was quite the entrepreneur on his native heath, but his luck turned bad the last year or two. The girl has nothing coming to her but debts and writs.’

  ‘What will happen to her?’ Miss Hawcross asks.

  ‘She’s not of an age to enter domestic service. She’ll go to Headington Workhouse. At fourteen she can begin proper employment, so it’ll only be for a couple of years.’

  ‘The workhouse!’ Miss Hawcross exclaims, and the word itself makes me feel cold and sick.

  ‘Unless you want to take her in. You know her better than anyone.’

  ‘I... I can’t Inspector. My circumstances will not allow it. I live with my sister and her husband. The house is chock-full already.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. The workhouse is not so bad – you can put all those Oliver Twist ideas out of your head. I know the Master, Guy Weatherforce. He is a hard man, but fair, and his wife, the Matron, she’s a good woman. It’ll do the girl good to mix with other children. From what I hear, she’s been alone in this house most of her life.’

  ‘She has an insolent manner I never cared for,’ Mr Bristol says. ‘Probably got it from the father. The pair of them put on such airs and graces, you would think they were royalty.’

  ‘We’ve been making enquiries in London,’ the Inspector says. ‘It seems George Francis was once a wealthy and influential man, before the fall of Smyrna. He had friends in all sorts of places, but they have withered on the vine. He banged on their doors too loud and too long it seems. The Colonial Office stopped hearing from him over a year ago. He had been trying for years to get some kind of compensation for the Greeks, but he was rebuffed at every turn, and he had, as you say Mr Bristol, a rather high-handed manner at times.

  ‘My theory is, he gave it up as hopeless, and began living high on the Committee funds. On top of that, he owed money to people in the City, not regular businessmen or banks you understand, but an underclass of moneylenders.’

  ‘Bloody Jews I expect,’ Bristol snorts.

  ‘A murky business indeed. In any case,’ the Inspector goes on, ‘I would not be surprised if that were the cause of his demise. You do not cross those men and expect to get away with it.’ There is a clink of glasses.

  ‘The poor girl,’ Miss Hawcross says.

  ‘A stint in the workhouse will do her good,’ Bristol declares. ‘Rub off some of the sharp edges. Pride comes before a fall, Miss Hawcross. That’s in the Bible, that is.’

  ‘Shall I tell her, Inspector?’ Miss Hawcross asks.

  ‘Best not. There’s no telling what she’ll do. She’s a pretty little thing, but I sense a wildness in her.’

  ‘That’ll be the dago blood,’ Bristol says. ‘I’ll bet it was dagos as did him in. They all carry knives, that sort. They’ll have your eye out as soon as look at you. Not like an Englishman, who will look you square in the face and give you his fist.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Weatherforce,’ the Inspector says, ignori
ng him. ‘Come New Year, we’ll get her out of here and into the Receiving Ward. You’ll still be able to visit her on Sundays, Miss Hawcross. It’s not a prison.’

  ‘Can she leave of her own volition?’

  ‘Not until she comes of age.’

  ‘Then it will be a prison for her, Inspector. She’s a bright, educated girl, and whatever her father did, she is not of the class that commonly makes up such establishments.’

  ‘Needs must, when the Devil drives, Miss Hawcross,’ the Inspector says. ‘I agree with Mr Bristol. The girl has had an eccentric upbringing. By all accounts, she has been indulged. It may do her a positive good to mix with her social inferiors and have some discipline applied. I was something of a tearaway itself, until the Army knocked it out of me.’

  I hear a hand thump a table in triumph, and glasses jumping.

  ‘There you are Miss Hawcross,’ Bristol exclaims, ‘As prettily put as you like. It will be the making of her, I’m sure. Now stop your worrying and let us put it to the good Inspector how we are to get the monies that are still due to us. There has to be something left. A crook like George Francis will have something put by in a corner, and I says we have first claim to it, for doing right by his brat of a daughter if nothing else.’

  I step away from the door and quietly walk up the hall; all the while the thoughts are running about my head like those merry-go-round horses again. What I know of workhouses I have read in stories. Please sir, can I have some more, sir?

  And I know that the last bits and pieces of the world I knew are not to be here much longer.

  I AM NOT a thief, even if they think my father is one. But the Inspector was quite right about the Devil driving and all that. Pa used to say that too.

  The things I heard them say have suddenly cleared away all the black wool from my head, and I feel I am thinking clearly again for the first time since Miss Hawcross came into my room that horrible morning.

  Pa is gone, buried in an English Graveyard. The other Greeks have disowned us, and those grown-ups who still have anything to do with me are going to sell me into servitude. Or something like.

  I could go to Jack, the way he said I should if I were in trouble, but when there are policemen involved, and a murder, and all these legal things, I feel sure that turning up on his doorstep would do nothing but start a whole other kind of trouble, and I do not want to bring that on him.

  The law says I am a child and the State must look after me. But I can look after myself. Or at the very least, I have to try.

  I NEVER USED to take much notice of the moon before, but now at night I find myself studying it, and gauging just how fat or thin it is. I wonder if the sight of it right now still brings the thing in Luca to the boil, and lets it out like steam from a whistling kettle. It’s odd, how the way you see things changes after a time. The men in the black hats and suits frighten me more than the wolf in the attic, and the attic itself seems like a hideaway, somewhere safe from the plans the world is hatching for me. Luca does not fear the dark, because he is a creature of it. I should like to be that way too, because what goes on in the daylight world fills me with dread.

  IN THE NEXT two days the house becomes like... like Toad Hall filled with weasels. Mr Bristol has admitted a series of new lodgers.

  There is Mr Bartholomew, a skinny long-necked young man who takes Pa’s old bedroom and makes thin porridge in the morning for breakfast and burns the bottom of the pot. He works in the University Press on Walton Street, and always has ink on his fingers.

  Then there is Mr Beeswick. He is a carter with thick forearms and a big pot-belly who sets up in Pa’s study and smokes cheroots and stinks out the house with them. He wears a leather apron to work, and hangs it up in the hall, and smells of horse, which I rather like. But I don’t like the way he watches me as I make up my meals in the basement. And he was drunk the first night in the house and tapped his knee and told me to sit on it and I told him to go to the Devil, and he slapped his thick thigh and said I was a little spitfire.

  Miss Hawcross has been in and out. She was chaffed by Mr Beeswick and looked as though she should like to slap him – I would love to have seen that. But I sense that she is already washing her hands of me, and she has an odd guilty play on her face every time I speak to her. She is Mr Bristol’s creature now I think. Perhaps the two of them truly believe that Pa has secreted money about the house, like he was Captain Flint. But if he had, surely he would have used some of it to pay the rent and buy proper food at the end of the month?

  In any case, there are no more lessons – so I don’t suppose I will ever learn which king came after fat Henry, and I do not greatly care. Miss Hawcross has given me another half crown, and told me not to let on, as if I needed telling.

  I wish I knew what had happened to Pa’s watch. It had a photograph under the lid which he never let me look at, but I am sure it was of my mother. And now there is a murderer walking about Oxford with it in his pocket, who knows what she looked like better than I do.

  I HAVE ALMOST twelve shillings saved up now, and I have been taking other items out of the kitchen when no-one is looking, and under my bed I have built up quite a little kit-bag of useful things. At night when the house is finally quiet, I lay them all out on a blanket. There is small hurricane lantern which I found in the garden shed. The glass is cracked, but it works well enough, and I have the oil for it too.

  Matches. A tin water bottle and enamel mug. A knife and fork, and some soap and a facecloth and spare socks. The stubs of some old candles, a pencil, Pa’s scarf and wool cap. And a small cloth bag into which I cram cheese and biscuits and a tin of bully beef.

  It is like preparing for an expedition. I wonder what Shackleton or Scott would have included. It would be nice to have a revolver, for polar bears and other things. I miss my little knife.

  I try loading in some books too, but they take up too much room in the little knapsack which holds everything. Once I have wrapped the lantern in a blanket and strapped it to the outside and have crammed everything else inside, the bag is chock-full. There is nothing for it but to leave the books behind, but I will not abandon them for Mr Bristol to pawn or paw over. They have been my friends in a way, as much as Pie has been. So I take all of them up to the attic and store them in a box.

  It is a strange feeling to stand over them in that forgotten place, to see my things put away up there as so many others were in the years gone by. In some ways it feels almost like another kind of funeral.

  I promise myself that I will come back for them, but I wonder how many of the people who lived in the house thought the same. Perhaps one day another girl will find her way into the attic and come across my books years from now, and wonder who it was who put them there. My name is on the fly-leaf of every one. No doubt the girl of the future will wonder who Anna Francis was, and whether she ever amounted to anything. The thought is rather horrible. I do not want to be a lost life. I do not want to be forgotten. That is what the workhouse would mean, and I simply will not have it.

  IT IS NEW Year’s Eve, and the 1920’s are just about done. This night is my last in the old house where I have lived ever since we fled Greece.

  It is a queer feeling to know that. I was five years old the first time Pa and I walked down Moribund Lane, and now I feel more grown-up than I ever thought I would, though I am barely twelve.

  I certainly feel more sensible than some of the people who are laughing and shouting downstairs. Mr Beeswick and Mr Bartholomew have invited some friends of theirs here for the evening, and they are all in Pa’s study, drinking. There is a gramophone playing Blue Skies, and then Bye Bye Blackbird, and I stop to listen to the music for a few minutes on the landing.

  As I tiptoe down the stairs I am crying. I can’t help it and no-one can see me, so I don’t suppose it matters. I stand in the hall and listen to them with their big, beery laughter in the study which was always so quiet when Pa was alive, the music crackling out of it now along with rattles of talk. I hitc
h up my knapsack, hug Pie close, and open the front door.

  There are quite a few people walking up and down, and the snow has died back to frozen rinds of blackened slush. It still feels very cold, and I stand on the front step of the house by the open door for a few minutes. Even now, none of this seems quite real. It is not until I close the door quietly behind me and I hear the lock snick into place that I am sure I can walk on, one step at a time.

  One step at a time. I wipe my face, and kiss Pie, and the straps of the knapsack feel heavy and good and purposeful on my shoulders. I get a few looks as I tramp down the road towards Walton Street, and I put a brave face on it in case someone should stop me and ask what I am about. That is the problem with being twelve. All the grown-ups think they have a right to know your business.

  The music fades, I turn the corner where once Luca saw me off, and Moribund Lane is behind me, and whatever life I had there is now in the past, as much as is the lost city where I was born. Of all my family, I am the only one left now, and I have to start making a life of my own.

  Part Two:

  The Roads of England

  And the Lord said unto Satan,

  Whence comest thou? Then Satan

  answered to the Lord, and said

  From going to and fro in the earth,

  And from walking up and down in it.

  Job 1:7

  13

  THE PUBS ARE busy, and there is piano music plinking out of the Jericho and people have spilled out of the front bar onto the pavement. Someone tugs on my knapsack as I go by, but I wrench free and plod on, head down, ignoring everything they say. Drunken louts, I think, and part of me wishes I could see their faces if Luca suddenly appeared as the wolf in their midst. The thought makes me smile, and I feel almost light-hearted as I walk north, then make the familiar turn down Walton Well Road.