by Rose Tremain
I released Lindsey’s hand and she turned it round. The initials L.S. were faint but clearly visible on her palm, and she laughed with pleasure.
The other girls, including Jennifer, applauded. Then they began to question me about how it was done, but Black’s had warned me that ‘The wise young illusionist does not reveal the tricks of his magic,’ and so I said: ‘I can’t explain it. It isn’t like Physics with set laws. It’s something else.’
I kept myself awake most of that night, perfecting a new trick to show Lindsey the next day. By the time dawn broke, I could pass a plastic beaker through the surface of a table.
Then I lay down on my bed and went to sleep in a second, like Cord could do when he turned off The Brains Trust.
I had a dream about Miss McRae. She stood in my room looking at my sheets of marbling. She turned to me and said: ‘Oil upon water. So simple. Yet look what can be done, Mary.’
The Good Man
On a Sunday morning in April, Ernie Loomis woke up very early and looked at the soft light in the bedroom and at Grace sleeping peacefully beside him.
He could hear pigeons murmuring in the yard and other birds singing somewhere in the high beeches behind the barns.
He felt contented, as he could never remember feeling before. He looked at his life and admired it. He thought, everything is good: the acres of land and the acres of sky; Grace in her little booth with her cash register; the grazing animals; Pete safe in his bus; the smart shop with its blue and gold awning; the name Loomis travelling further and wider across Suffolk; even Walter, his sweet nature and his bull’s head and his songs.
Easter was coming. Ernie had an order of two dozen ducks to dress for Swaithey Hall.
After he’d admired his life for ten or fifteen minutes, Ernie got up and, without waking Grace, found his clothes and tip-toed downstairs with them and put them on.
He let himself into the shop. He saw the sun coming up behind the pink colourwashed cottages opposite and knew that the day was going to be fine.
He put on his apron. He sharpened a paring knife and a cleaver. He prepared a clean tray. He went to the cold room and took half a dozen mallard off their hooks. They had been plucked and drawn by Pete and Walter, but their sleek heads were still on, and their webbed feet. He set them down on his block and began work, slicing off the heads and the feet with the cleaver, paring out the tail skin, trimming and tidying and then, with deft, effortless movements, tying the birds up and plumping their breasts before laying them on the tray.
The sun climbed higher and shone yellow on the empty shop-window. Ernie turned and looked at it. He thought of Easter Sunday, of daffodils and forsythia in the church and bowls of primroses picked by the children. He thought, everything is at peace.
He stood very still as he worked. He was forty-nine years old. Since the end of the war he had been entirely happy.
He looked up from the block for a split second. He fancied he had heard, in the midst of the dawn quiet, the shop bell jingle.
His right hand should have paused half-way from his shoulder but it did not. It brought the cleaver down on his three fingers resting on the duck’s neck and sliced them off, just above the knuckles.
He saw what had happened. He saw his three ends of fingers lying on the block and thought, I have done a fatal thing, I have done something that has no ending and no resolution. But then, when the pain came flying at him, he said to himself: It’s perfectly all right: I’ve armed myself against it. This is why I woke when it was barely light with my vision of a beautiful life – it was to arm myself against this. Because these things conquer: the spring sky with no clouds, the Easter bells, the shine on the grass and the innocent pride of the gold and blue lettering, Arthur Loomis & Son, Family Butchers. They conquer. This is what they do.
So he didn’t move. He saw his blood soak into the green feathers of the duck’s head and stain them brown. He noticed, after a moment or two, that the duck was lying in a puddle of blood that was spreading across the block and oozing into his apron like warm oil.
His right hand lost all its strength and the cleaver fell out of it and clattered to the floor.
This little noise might have woken Grace, far above, but it did not. Sunday morning sleep was precious and she turned over and sighed and went back to her dreams.
Ernie tried to move now because he looked at the window and saw that there was no sun there. The shadow of his adversary was so great, it was taking away all the light, and for the first time he thought, perhaps I’m not going to win the fight. So he tried to move to Grace’s little booth where, in a wooden drawer, bandages were kept.
He was down. He couldn’t walk. It’s all right, he thought, I am down but that’s all and I can crawl now or slither across the tiles like an eel and what matters is not only a bandage but all that was in my head or in my mind …
But he had forgotten what was in his mind. His mind was a hollow and dark. He knew that what had been in it still existed, still lay beyond it somewhere, was still out there in the silent morning.
‘It is there!’ he said aloud. And then a question, a last one, flared like a thin flame in the blackness: ‘Does it no longer belong to me?’
His blood had been flowing for almost an hour when Grace found him at half-past seven. He had been dead for nine minutes.
She screamed. Walter came flying down the stairs in his flannel pyjamas. They knelt in the blood puddle, clinging together. ‘It can’t be. It can’t be. It can’t be!’ they said.
Later that morning, Pete laid out his brother’s body in the cold room. He removed the saturated clothes. Ernie’s body was waxy and white, the colour of tripe. Pete washed it and dried it and bound the mutilated fingers with muslin. He said to himself, Ernie was a good man.
He covered him with a sheet.
It was Easter Week. The Rev. Geddis could not fit in a funeral. There would be a wait, just a short one, of eight days.
In the lanes and ditches and woods outside Swaithey, the village children went to gather primroses, to make posies for the church.
In the wait for the funeral, while Grace lay in bed and couldn’t be consoled, not even by her dreams which were all of her wedding, Walter went out to Pete’s bus and sat in it alone, playing records on the wind-up. It was the year of the Everly Brothers’ ‘All I Have to Do is Dream’.
At night, in his bed next to his mother’s room, he lay awake. He felt thirsty, not for liquid, but for something he couldn’t put any name to. And the moment he slept, the thing he dreaded most started to happen: Arthur Loomis began talking to him.
In his dreams, Walter tried to hide from Arthur. He tried hiding in the pig-sties and underneath the bus and in a barrel of rain, but Arthur was all-knowing and all-seeing and could find him anywhere. He smiled at Walter. His eyes were gentle and kind. He said, ‘I’m only here, boy, to tell you what you already know. Your future is in the shop. It is the only future you possess.’
‘I know,’ Walter replied. ‘I know.’
The shop was closed for a while. The blinds were drawn down. A notice was taped to the glass. It was Pete who scrubbed Ernie’s blood from the floor and from the block. He cleaned the cleaver with steel wool and put it away.
Relations arrived to comfort Grace. Somehow it was she, only, who was considered to be in need of comfort and they did not try to console Walter or Pete. They were mostly women, Grace’s sisters and cousins. They discussed the floral tributes they would order and the hymns that were to be sung at the funeral service. They sat by Grace’s fireside and did their knitting and patted their hair and looked at their clean hands. They repeated old stories about wartime. They baked scones and made strong tea.
Walter left them sitting there. They appeared not to notice his going, yet they did, and felt more at ease, more ready with their small comforts and their plans, after he’d gone. For one thing, his Aunt Josephine remarked to herself, he’s too large for the chairs.
There was nowhere for him to g
o except the bus. Wandering in the sunshine hurt his eyes and his heart.
He and Pete cooked sausages on the primus stove and wore out two gramophone needles on the Everly Brothers. They had a lot to say, but couldn’t say it. Then, in the space of one evening, they composed one verse and the chorus of a song and Walter’s thirst for something he couldn’t name abated.
He owned a guitar now and could play it well. The song had a two-part accompaniment on guitar and banjo. Proud of it, Walter’s thoughts drifted away from death and away from his future in the shop and back to Sandra who had sent him a card of condolence. The card had a poem in it. It was the kind of poem that seemed to have been written by a factory of poems, Walter thought, and Sandra’s own little message – ‘With deepest sympathy for Your Recent Loss’ – seemed made, too, in a message factory. But this didn’t diminish her. It made Walter all the more determined to sit her down in an empty green field and sing her his own songs that came only from inside him and not from a song-making machine.
He was going bald. He thought of Sandra running her fingers through his curly hair and coming across the thin patch on his crown and caressing it sweetly.
The song was called ‘Cold as Winter in the Spring’. It was a song for Ernie. It would describe his dying. The words, all except one or two, were Walter’s and the tune mainly Pete’s. The bit of it they wrote in a single evening went like this:
They say the snow falls at the turning of the year,
They say in April come the meadow flowers,
They say the short days are the ones to fear,
They say that life gets sweeter in the longer hours.
But oh I don’t believe them any more.
I don’t believe in April blackbirds sing.
The worst came later and the best before.
For me it’s cold as winter in the spring.
They wanted to finish it in time for the funeral. They wanted to ask Grace and the Rev. Geddis if they could sing it in the church, like the relatives of the dead sang at funeral services in the Southern Baptist churches. But the next verse wouldn’t come. Ernie’s death had been so ugly and so swift, there seemed to be no words stern enough to describe it. They attempted some lines in which they rhymed ‘cleaver’ with ‘never’, and then felt embarrassed by them. They had the tune and the thing about winter and spring which Pete called ‘a pretty idea, Walt’ but this was all.
They stayed up late, struggling with the song. It was the night of Easter Sunday. The funeral was two days away. All the floral tributes had been designed and ordered and a black veil sewn onto Grace’s hat.
In the dark, Aunt Josephine was sent out with a torch to bring Walter home. As she made her way carefully across the meadow she heard the sound of singing and said under her breath: ‘A good man has left us and this is what they do.’
Magic Boxes
Mary was trying to grow.
Her head barely came up to Lindsey Stevens’s shoulders and she wanted it to reach much higher, to her eyes.
Someone had told her you could grow by stretching yourself. In the school gym, she hung by her hands from the wall bars. At home, she swung from door lintels.
She reminded herself of a pupa, suspended by a thread in its interim life. She imagined that, as she grew, her man’s skin was hardening on her.
She liked vaulting. The gym teacher noted her agility and her lack of fear. She hit the springboard hard, and flew. Her landings were neat. She won a place in the Junior Gym Team and with it a yellow sash. She examined the sash which was like sacred ribbon. She wondered whether brilliance at vaulting could lead to fame and glory.
When the summer term began she returned to school with seven new conjuring tricks. She told Lindsey: ‘I’m working on a very big, difficult trick at home and if you’d like to come and stay with me in the summer holidays, I’ll have it ready to show you.’ Lindsey said she didn’t know whether she would be able to come and stay. At Easter she’d met a boy from a public school. His name was Ranulf Morrit. He was sixteen. He had taught her how to French-kiss. He understood Greek. He had minute handwriting. He was going to write a letter from Haileybury once a week.
Mary thought, one day I will be like Ranulf Morrit. I will be tall enough to bend down and kiss Lindsey’s mouth. I will not be able to show off with Greek, but I will care for her.
In History, the class was studying the Arthurian legend. Miss Gaul said: ‘It may be that the Round Table did not exist, but of course it has existed down the centuries in people’s minds, so you could say that it has an existence of a certain kind.’ Mary said: ‘Are there other things in History that only had one kind of existence and not another?’
Miss Gaul said: ‘Well, Marty, History is full of myths, legends and superstitions. For one person a myth may be a truth and for another just a foolish story.’
‘Who is right, though? The person who believes in it or the person who doesn’t?’
Miss Gaul smiled. It was a thing that seldom happened to her features. She said: ‘Neither is right. Neither is wrong.’
So Mary decided, Arthur was not a legend. Not for me. For me, he existed and Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot. And I will be like them. I will acquire an armour and I will be afraid of nothing. And in this way I will protect the people who could come to harm. I will protect Lindsey, who signs herself ‘Mrs Ranulf Morrit’ in her Geography Book, and I will protect Pearl, who refuses to learn to swim and could drown in Swaithey pond, and most of all I will protect Estelle: from Sonny’s rages; from forgetfulness; from being sent back to Mountview.
Mary’s big, difficult trick was called The Incredible Sword Box. She had bribed Timmy with Smarties to be her assistant. She had written a letter to the Magic Circle in London asking where or how she could come by ten swords. They wrote back: ‘Dear Martin Ward, It always gives us great pleasure to hear from budding magicians,’ but they hadn’t been helpful on the subject of the swords. They said: ‘Equipment of this kind is very expensive and we suggest you invite your friends to help you make swords of papier maché, which can look extremely effective.’
She didn’t want papier maché swords. She wanted real danger to be in this trick, so that her audience would first be frightened and then stunned with relief. If there was no danger, there would be no real fear.
She wrote to Cord, now returned to Gresham Tears. He wrote back: ‘I say, Martin, swords are a tall order. Not used much, you see, since the Charge of the Light Brigade. But here’s a thought: fencing rapiers! Do they do fencing at Weston? I used to fence as a boy. Makes you sharp and quick.’
But they did not teach fencing at Weston Grammar. Miss Gaul, when consulted, suggested the wardrobe department of the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich. She had a friend who worked in it in her spare time. The friend’s name was Miss Lyle. Miss Lyle wrote: ‘Dear Marty, What a fascinating request! Alas, we are an amateur company, and I am not at liberty to put Maddermarket property out to hire.’
Mary had built her box out of cardboard. She had made the holes where the swords would go in and where they would come out the other side. She had put Timmy inside the box. She fed him Smarties through the holes. Black’s advised: ‘Find the correct line of trajectory for each sword by practising with lengths of dowelling.’ Mary had never heard of the word ‘dowelling’. She unscrewed the iron rods from the head and end of her bed and practised with those.
To get Timmy to crouch absolutely still in the recommended position she played a game with him. She said: ‘What comes through the hole will either be a Smartie, or it will be an iron bar. If you move a single muscle I will know and no more Smarties will come, only the iron bars, and then you will be locked in.’
She loved the thought of Timmy waiting in the box, hoping for Smarties, with only the smallest pin-pricks of light to see by and no way of escape once the first five rods were through. When she performed the trick, using real swords, she was going to get him to sing in his sweet soprano to show the audience he hadn’t escaped and, then,
when the first sword went in, the singing would cease and everyone would be afraid.
It was a cold, windy summer. As it passed and the holidays got nearer, Mary began lying to Lindsey. She told her there was a pony to ride at the farm. Lindsey said: ‘Great.’
Lindsey showed her some of her letters from Ranulf Morrit. His parents lived in a manor. A trout stream ran through their garden. They employed a Spanish cook called Ramona.
Mary said: ‘He’s very boastful, isn’t he?’
Then in June, it was agreed: Lindsey would come to stay in the first week of the holidays for three nights. She was looking forward to the riding. She was curious to see Mary perform her ‘big, difficult trick’.
And it was in June that Estelle began to beg Sonny to hire a television. She said they were not a luxury any more. She said: ‘This is nearly 1960, Sonny.’ But he refused. He said it could not be afforded but this wasn’t his reason. He saw televisions as things which belonged in cities. The blueish light they gave out reminded him of the light of a city, its restlessness and its flicker. He didn’t want a square of city in his front room.
So Estelle wrote to Cord. She said: ‘The thing that helped me recover when I was at Mountview was What’s My Line?’
Cord sat in his chair and wondered about this. He remembered his own fondness for The Brains Trust and how it calmed him and reminded him that he was safe and that his country was safe. He wrote back to Estelle. He told her to hire a television and he would pay for it.
It arrived one afternoon. The first programme Estelle watched on it was Muffin the Mule. ‘Hello children,’ said Muffin.
The installers had climbed up onto the roof and attached a large aerial to the chimney, but the picture was indistinct, not clear and bright as it had been at Mountview and Estelle complained. She was told that a tree was interfering with the signal from London. The installers said: ‘If I were you and paying this kind of money I’d chop the tree down.’
Sonny, out in a wheatfield looking at the ears blown flat by the wind, saw the aerial go up. He guessed what had happened. Thomas Cord had always spoiled Estelle, always given in to her and pretended to her that she led a charmed life. And now she was in the middle of life, she saw it wasn’t charmed. She saw that no life was charmed, except at the pictures. So this was what she wanted now, her own little picture screen. Sonny spat at the wheat. He thought, now, with that television, my life won’t be the same. Every evening, it will do me some harm.