She led Aggie upstairs. I went and stood by the window and watched two of the boys chasing a hen round and round making it squawk and scatter feathers.
‘What are you gawping at?’ said a voice, suddenly, from behind me. I jumped and turned round to face a tall freckly boy with a thick thatch of hair falling in his eyes. Isaac.
‘Nothing,’ I retorted.
He grinned and whistled through his teeth. ‘The curse,’ he said, ‘your sister …’
‘You were listening!’ I said, blushing on Agatha’s behalf.
‘There’s not much I don’t hear,’ he boasted. He looked at the twins. ‘Got a screw loose then, have they?’
‘No they haven’t!’
‘All right,’ he said, grinning. ‘That don’t make no difference to me.’ He stood staring at me with his flat blue familiar eyes until I felt hot and embarrassed. ‘Milly,’ he said at last.
‘Isaac,’ I said.
‘That’s me.’
‘You’ve grown,’ I said, for my old playmate Isaac had been shorter and plumper, though no less grubby than this towering boy. ‘We used to play together, ages ago …’
‘Before your mam done herself in.’
I flinched at that. Already it was all coming back. The way he teased, the way he dared me. But I was not ready for his teasing. We had been quiet for too long, I had forgotten how to do it. ‘Before Mother died,’ I corrected stiffly.
‘Mother! Why don’t you say mam like anyone else?’
‘Mind your own business! I thought your mo … mam told you to get out. I’ll tell her you’ve been listening!’
Isaac flushed. ‘You!’ he said, ‘you look as if you’re going to blab.’
‘Not until you do!’ I said, straining against the lump in my throat. I had missed Isaac so much. I had not even known how much until now. And now we were fighting.
‘That don’t bother me if you do tell my mam,’ he said. ‘She can’t do nothing to me.’ But he went towards the door.
‘But she could tell Mr Howgego …’ I said.
‘He’s away, and so are Abe and Ben, eel-catching up March way, so I’m the man around here for now.’
‘Man!’ I sneered. Isaac gave me a furious blue look and then turned and slammed out of the door. I stood smouldering, watching from the window as he stalked away. I turned and looked at Ellenanesther, who were oblivious to the argument and to Isaac, playing hand over hand, and muttering and giggling.
‘Oh can’t you stop it!’ I shouted. ‘Why can’t you be like everyone else!’ They stopped their game and looked at me with their blank shut-in eyes.
‘Sorry Milly,’ they said together, and sat in silence.
‘Oh never mind,’ I muttered. It didn’t do to get angry with Ellenanesther. Whatever they did was innocent. Whatever.
Mrs Howgego gave us a loaf of warm bread to take home with us that first time, and I carried it, wrapped in a cloth to protect it from the hot dust that blew steadily across the land. We hurried. For what if Father had arrived home while we were out? When we’d gone a little way Isaac jumped up and greeted us as if he hadn’t seen us before, let alone fallen out with me not half an hour before. Always I was astonished by the way his temper would fizzle and die almost as soon as it began. My own smouldered on, would smoulder on, for ever.
Isaac walked some of the way with us, beating at the long grasses at the edge of the road with a stick and sending out showers of grasshoppers and other buzzing creatures. He said little to me and nothing to Agatha, but dropped back and walked with the twins, stopping to point things out: ‘That there’s a cricket! See him … he’s gone …’ and ‘That butterfly there he’s a Red Admiral,’ and ‘Woolly bears look! Mind out for them, they make you itch!’
And all the time Agatha walked ahead, proud and queenly, her head held carefully upright like a new cap of knowledge which must not be spilt.
But I could not stay angry with Isaac in the way I could stay angry with others, in the way I stayed angry with Agatha. And although I was irritated with him that day, it was nice having him there. It lightened the atmosphere, for we were a solemn lot, hurrying, anxious. In Mrs Howgego’s kitchen, with the boys larking about outside and the woman’s cosy way of rattling on I’d felt it, how quiet we were. It made me remember, sharply, how it was when Mother was there, how Aggie and I used to play by the fire, or outside the back door, running to Mother with tell-tales, and for hugs and kisses. How Mother had always made everything all right.
We never played so much once Mother had gone. Hardly ever laughed. There was work of course, and the babies to care for. They were nursed alongside our bewilderment and grief. Mother’s going splintered us somehow, and Father couldn’t hold us together. Oh we stayed together and the walls of the house contained us, but they did not hold us safe. We rattled inside, locked in our own heads – but for the twins who grew as one.
We’re more together now than ever we were then. In the evening, like this evening, we’ll spend time together. The hearth is empty of flames since the evenings have been warm and light. It’s June. Must be around the longest day, and despite the rain that has been pouring down almost all day it is not chilly. There is the fresh earthy smell of summer rain drifting through the broken window; and wet pewtery light falls on the red brick of the arch, on the cobwebs in the corner.
I like cobwebs: tight stretched silk when they’re new, shiny – works of art; and when they’re old they drop soft and dusty and shrunken, so soft you can hardly feel them brushing you.
In the evenings we knit, Aggie and I, and sometimes, even, we play cards. These games are the first since our childhood. Rummy. It took a lot of time, a lot of argument before we remembered the rules. It takes concentration, patience – and Aggie so wants to win. It wouldn’t bother me if it didn’t bother her so much. I wouldn’t care if she didn’t. And so, because there must always be a winner and a loser, there are always fights. Not physical, oh no, but words, lashing words that whip us back, slash open the skin over our memories so they spill out confused and jumbled. We make of them what we can, what we will.
But tonight we knit, one each side of the empty hearth listening to the pouring of the rain, the occasional drop that finds its way down the chimney, and to the click of our needles and Agatha’s sighs. Why she must always sigh I don’t know. Ellenanesther are in the kitchen making their tea. They eat after us always, and always cold food, arranged like doll’s food on their plates. They love to cut things up: a square of cheese apiece; half a tomato; a cucumber ring; bread and butter cut into tiny squares. And they eat the same things at the same time, chewing in unison. We leave them to it, clear our stuff out of the way – or I do more often than not – and leave them to it. Only, after they have finished I put away the knives. I like to put away, to count the knives, for they are dangerous things and must be treated with respect. I count them and I shine the blades, and then I put them in the dresser drawer.
Aggie’s cats are piled in front of the hearth, most of them, or draped on the backs of chairs and on window-sills. It’s a greyish tabby pile, like grubby washing, a purring, breathing heap. She knows the names – or claims she does. I don’t even know how many there are now. When Mark, the boy, comes in his van with our groceries on, I think, alternate Friday afternoons, there is more cat food than anything else. There are biscuits, of course. Lots of them, gingernuts and bourbons and pink wafers and fig rolls and chocolate digestives and custard creams; and there’s tea and condensed milk (since the milkman won’t come here, and anyway we love the sweetness) and bread and cheese and eggs and olives, oh I love olives! and other bits and pieces. I like a nice slice of ham on Sunday, with a spot or two of mustard. And always a bottle of gin.
‘What is it that you’re knitting?’ says Agatha suddenly, spitefully.
‘It doesn’t signify,’ I reply. I will not rise to her bait tonight.
‘You’ve been at it long enough. How many years is it? Will it be ready for Christmas?’ She cackle
s at her idea of a joke, but I do not laugh, nor even smile. The important thing is that I’m knitting. The important thing is the rhythm of it, the clickety clickaclicka of the needles knocking their tiny heads together over and over and over. ‘Socks for the boys in the trenches was it? Or something nice for the painters? A matinee jacket for George? A cosy shroud?’ She cackles again. Witch. I cannot resist her teasing. I knit tighter, pulling the old wool tauter and tauter until it snaps. Another knot.
Agatha begins to sing. Her voice is not what it was. I cannot believe the words she sings:
‘You should see the weeping women with their faces white as cheese;
they seem to moan and shake their fists like me;
There’s a sympathetic look upon every cabbage leaf;
and a broken ladder hanging from a tree.’
‘That’s never right, Agatha!’ I say.
‘What is it then?’ she says. ‘Go on, if you know so much you sing it.’ She smirks and I simply cannot be bothered to answer. I can hardly see to knot my dark wool, disappearing in the gloom.
Agatha knits with bright pink nylon she orders from a catalogue. She likes catalogues. Anything she can get like that, free. She strains her eyes for hours at a time, sighing. If only we could afford new clothes – but there is no money to spare. It is years since we had new clothes. Aggie wore out all Mother’s, and then we used to send off for things, dresses and cardigans and shoes, but there has not been the money for a long time. I still wear the last dress I bought. It is horrible, a horrible shiny indestructible material. No, it is not indestructible, it will melt. I brushed the sleeve over a candle one morning and melted a black hole which is there still, irritating, black and stiffened like a scar.
The postman will not come out here. It is not the distance, the post office explained, it is the fact that there is no road here, just a track that comes close. Mark manages though in his van. Our hero! And he brings the post too, and he takes Agatha’s letters. She is the only one who writes letters, and gets letters. She likes to make a performance of opening the envelopes, so important. She knits doilies for the sideboard. It is thick with them. She knits antimacassars for the antimacassars; egg-cosies and tea-cosies and frilly jam-pot covers that soon grow thick and sticky with jam and mould; she knits blankets for the cats, to heap in the corners, to weave with their hairs. She knits them all in bright cheap indestructible nylon. But they have no meaning.
Mrs Howgego began to call. She’d come toiling along the path, and I’d usually spot her first from my perch on Father’s window sill, a large billowy figure with two or three little clouds of dust – her boys – racing ahead of her. She always carried a big wicker basket, and in the basket, always there was something for us: an apple dumpling, or some raspberries, or a pot of damson cheese.
She’d come straight into the kitchen, no knocking, no standing on ceremony, for she saw us as children, children playing house, and this incensed her. Four great girls and no mother! she’d mutter, rustling in, muscling in, her arms in the sink, her head in the cupboard almost before she’d said how do. In fact our house, then, was tidier than hers but she never saw this, saw only that the apples were falling and past their best for storing, or that Agatha had let the lettuce bolt.
All the same, we always enjoyed her visits, listened without complaint to her fussing, brewed her pots of tea. The twins would stand and look round-eyed at her while she clucked at them twopeasinapod and IswearIneverdid. They smiled, pleased to have their identical identity so confirmed.
Agatha played up to her of course. After all, she was the oldest and a woman now. Mrs Howgego herself had said so. This was what the blood and the pain meant, a new importance. She used to stare at herself in the old mirror. I saw her peering, turning her head this way and that. From the front she was beautiful, looking in the mirror she could see beauty and she smiled Mother’s smile and was satisfied, but if she turned her head she could see that her nose was wrong. Too long, too sharp. Ugly? Beautiful? If only someone would say. She would turn away from the mirror, impatient.
Aggie played the hostess to Mrs Howgego with some grace, arranging the tea things prettily, offering a seat, finding scraps to say – ‘How are you Mrs Howgego? and the boys? Warm enough for you Mrs Howgego? Looks like rain.’ – and not forgetting to offer cake and glasses of milk to the boys. Between them there was common ground, and I was excluded, Agatha made that quite clear, for they were both women and I was still a little girl. Now and again the visitor would lean forward confidentially, sometimes even grasping Agatha’s hand, ‘Everything shipshape?’ she’d ask, lowering her eyes towards Agatha’s belly.
And Agatha would blush and nod, ‘Quite in order, thank you,’ flattered and ashamed.
And there was gossip too. When Father stopped coming home regularly he arranged for Sara Gotobed who ran the village shop to deliver our groceries – which were paid for direct from the bank. Mrs Gotobed was a stout whiskery woman whom Mrs Howgego could not abide. ‘They’re a bad batch them Gotobeds,’ she’d say. ‘Mind you don’t go listening to any of her nonsense.’
We did listen, of course, but we did not believe, for she said bad things about Mrs Howgego. They said bad things about each other, but it was Mrs Howgego we believed. Mrs Gotobed attended all the births in the village and she was angry that Mother had not chosen her for her confinements. I suppose that was why she never liked us much, never had much time for us, except to pause now and then and say evil things about our friend.
‘You want to watch that Candida Howgego,’ she’d say, nodding in the direction of the Howgego house. ‘There’s never a month goes by without her trying to cheat me out of a farthing for this, or a halfpenny for that. And what her old man gets up to is nobody’s business but I reckon half the babes born in the village have that mean old Howgego look to ’em.’
We smiled wisely, not sure what she meant and certainly not believing a word of it. We didn’t like Sara Gotobed much, and Aggie and Ellenanesther kept out of the way when she called. I used to talk to her a bit, but she didn’t like me. I could see she didn’t and so in the end I kept away too.
Mrs Howgego was pleased when I told her that we didn’t like Sara. ‘I should weigh out every last thing she brings you,’ she advised. ‘She sold me short on soap last month, and flour the month before – and then there were moths in it. And you should see the state of her house! That’s a wonder she manages to hang on to that man of hers … that’s only fear of her tongue that does it. She’s got him wound round her pinky like a bit of string.’
Whenever I saw that Isaac was with his mother, I’d run to meet him, hot and breathless with excitement, and embarrassed by my own eagerness – for it was only with Isaac that I could be a proper child.
We’d greet each other awkwardly and Mrs Howgego would shake her head at the pair of us until we trailed off round the back to pelt apples and stones at a target he’d drawn on the barn wall; or balance in the low boughs of the fruit trees and talk.
‘I’m getting away from here soon as I can,’ he said once, his face screwed up with the sourness of the early apple he was eating.
‘You’ll get collywobbles,’ I warned, having suffered similarly myself. ‘Away where?’
‘The army maybe,’ he said, picking at a scab on his knee.
‘The army!’ I looked at him with admiration imagining a picture-book soldier, red frogged jacket, shiny buttons, a grey horse. ‘Away from here, anyway,’ he said.
‘I might … miss you,’ I said. I felt embarrassed to mention a feeling.
Isaac squinted at me and then looked away, flushing. ‘Mam says that’s all very well us being, friends now like, while you’re still a girl. But she says you’ll be a woman soon and then it wouldn’t be … nice … being, you know, alone together.’ He looked back at me and wrinkled his nose. ‘Though you don’t look much like a woman to me,’ he added.
I looked down at my flat neat child’s body. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t do I? Aggie’s
one though, and she doesn’t look it either.’
‘Funny that,’ he agreed.
‘But I hope you won’t stop being my friend, Isaac. I won’t be able to help it, you know.’
‘But you might not want to do things,’ he said, ‘when you are one. You might want to do other things instead.’
‘What do you mean? Like what?’
‘Oh I don’t know. Woman’s things. I don’t reckon you’ll still climb trees. You’ll have to keep yourself nice.’
‘Your mam says babies come if you don’t keep yourself nice.’ I pondered for a minute. Surely climbing a tree wouldn’t make a baby come? I felt his eyes upon me and when I looked up he was looking at me strangely.
‘Don’t you know nothing?’ he asked. ‘How you get babes?’
Hot blood rushed to my cheeks and I jumped down from the tree so that he wouldn’t see. ‘Anyway, if you’re joining the army you’ll be gone by the time I’m a woman.’
‘You don’t, do you? Haven’t you ever watched your Barley being served? Or the chucks with the old cockadoodledoo?’
A flutter of squawking feathers flashed through my mind; the triumphant bellow of the bull. I picked up a hard green apple and flung it at the barn, hitting the centre of the target with a dull thud. ‘Don’t believe you,’ I said, although I did.
Those times were good. Those odd ordinary days when I was not odd, but ordinary. A little girl with a long plait. A little girl with a friend. Once we raced to Mother’s Dyke for a dare, to see if they noticed we were gone. As we stood looking into the brownness of the water I talked about Mother, how perhaps she was in there still.
‘I reckon she’ll be out at sea by now,’ he said. ‘In Africa maybe. That’s not the same water anyway, that’s different water all the time.’ We pondered this for some time. I had never thought before that the water that streamed past endlessly was different water, new water that poured forever away.
Honour Thy Father Page 3