by S. T. Haymon
The house, Virginia creeper-clad, with two single-storeyed wings projecting at right angles from its main bulk, surrounded the garden on three sides. Under the dining-room window, in the centre, was a large rose bed where, in season, debilitated roses bloomed consumptively. Due to the way the house was built, in one of the old Norwich courtyards – courts, as they are called locally – surrounded by tall houses of earlier and later construction, few sunbeams found their way into the garden, where such as did collapsed exhausted, at the end of their range. Ferns were what grew there best, laurels, and some other vegetable matter of dubious pedigree, of which the best that could be said for it was that it was at least green.
Looking at the garden with eyes unaccustomedly critical, I worried about what Pillow would think of it, after what he had been used to. However, I didn’t worry too much, because I was a great believer in the power of love. I was convinced that my loving care would more than make up for the wide open spaces of St Awdry’s.
May Bowden smiled when she saw us coming, which, whilst it boded well, was aesthetically a pity. It was not her best expression. Her false teeth were so large and shiny, with such a lot of pretend gum showing, they would have made her look like the Wolf in Red Riding Hood if it hadn’t been for the rouge on her cheeks and the lipstick on her lips. As it was, she looked like a raddled old woman with more money than sense.
I was practically certain May Bowden did not get her face powder off cream bonbons bought in the Market Place, because when she bent down and kissed me, which she did from time to time, she didn’t smell of vanilla, but of Parma violets. Sometimes, when she kissed me, some of the powder got on to the front of my dress, and I could smell it for a long time afterwards. I once invited Maud to have a sniff, it smelled so nice, but all I got back was, ‘Lucky she didn’t smear you with her hair. We’d ’a had a fine job getting that out!’
May Bowden’s hair was a bright red which Maud said came out of a bottle; but my father said he remembered old Mr Bowden, and he had had red hair too, so it couldn’t have: to which Maud’s dour retort had been to the effect that in that case they must both have used the same bottle.
Old Mr Bowden, who died before I was born, had been a boot-mender who had been so good at his trade that he had ended up owning a boot and shoe factory which he had sold to a large company for a lot of money. The company had stuck a new front on to the factory, but round at the side you could still read, shadows on the dingy bricks, Bowden & Co. Quality Footwear for Ladies, Gentlemen, and Infants. Artisans’ Boots. Only the Best Suffices.
With the money from the sale of the factory Mr Bowden had built a lot of horrid little rows of houses in the streets down by the river, and named them after the women in his life, such as Ivy Terrace and May Terrace, named after his wife and his daughter. Nobody knew who Daphne Terrace and Sophie Terrace and Beryl Villas and Millicent Villas were named after, but, as my father said, you had to give a man the benefit of the doubt. When Mr Bowden died, his wife having predeceased him, he left all the houses, and all the rents that came out of them, to his daughter May.
Maud said that he had ground the faces of the poor, to say nothing of making them ill by putting in bad drains, and no good would ever come of money got in that way. As May Bowden had promised to leave all her money to me when she died, I hoped it was only Maud being niggly: that the money hadn’t been got as sinfully as she made out.
May Bowden came to the garden gate, pinning a lock of her bright red hair back into place as she came. She wore her hair in a style I was familiar with from old photographs, flat on top as though permanently squashed by the wearing of heavy hats. She leaned over the gate to look at the cowslip ball and the tin with King Edward and Queen Alexandra, both of which I was carrying in the box in which the roast chicken had been packed.
‘You dear child!’ she trilled, showing all the false teeth at once. ‘You’ve brought me cowslips!’
It was embarrassing to have to explain that the cowslips were spoken for. ‘But I’ll be sure to bring you some back next time,’ I promised, looking sideways at Maud. Mr Fenner, after all, had invited me to come again soon. But all Maud did was to say brutally, ‘They’ll be over by then.’
‘Things are always over when it’s my turn.’ May Bowden spoke without self-pity, but I felt awful. I put the box down on the ground, picked up the tin, and held it out to her.
‘I’ve brought you back something much better than cowslips!’
May Bowden was in no hurry to take my gift. The stare she directed at King Edward with a hole skewered through his nose held none of the respect she was accustomed to accord royalty.
She said coldly, ‘I’m not short of tins, thank you.’
‘Not the tin! What’s inside!’
Carefully, as Tom had done, I raised the lid of the tin, just enough to get my hand inside, and pressing lightly on the toad’s back so that it couldn’t make a sudden leap for freedom. Despite the discomforts of the journey, it still felt cool and contented. Its head popped up between my thumb and forefinger, so sweet, so good-humoured, that May Bowden was instantly conquered.
‘A frog!’ she exclaimed. ‘Just like in the fairy stories!’
Maud sniffed. ‘If you think that one’s going to turn into a prince you’ve got another think coming! It’s not a frog. It’s a toad.’
‘His name’s Pillow,’ I intervened hastily. ‘I thought he could live in your garden and eat up all the bad insects and things. Adding unwisely, ‘And I could come and visit him, being just next door.’
May Bowden withdrew the hand which had been about to lift Pillow out of his makeshift nest. Her countenance had become narrow and suspicious.
‘Let’s get one thing straight, young lady. Is it your toad or mine? Or are you simply proposing that I should let you use my amenities for your own purposes?’
I gulped. Maud opened her mouth to speak, and shut it again without saying anything. Put on the spot, I assumed my most endearing smile and said, ‘It’s yours. I already told you.’
‘Let him choose where he wants to be.’
May Bowden lifted Pillow out of the tin and placed him tenderly on the cobblestones. The toad’s bright eyes rolled from side to side. He took in his new quarters and made a quick decision. Finding the beach pebbles, apparently, a lot easier going with four legs than human beings with two, he bounced over to the rockery and, after another brief pause for inspection, clambered over a giant conch shell and a couple of broken bricks to disappear into a clump of fresh young ferns which had not yet unfolded all their croziers.
‘No time lost making himself at home!’ May Bowden’s voice vibrated with satisfaction. She hugged me to her beaded bodice, gave me another of her Parma-violets kisses. In so doing she must have caught a whiff of Salham St Awdry, because she straightened up abruptly. ‘You need a bath, child.’
Maud said, ‘Come on, Sylvie. She’s got her present. You don’t have to stay to be insulted.’
‘Sylvia knows how grateful I am,’ May Bowden responded with dignity. ‘She also knows I know that when she smells like a manure heap it’s not her who’s to blame.’ Her delight in the gift getting the better of her malice: ‘He shall be my watch toad. I shall teach him to croak when anyone comes to the door.’
‘Not that sort you won’t,’ Maud returned with satisfaction. ‘All that sort o’ toad does is make a kind of cough.’
‘In that case I shall buy him some cough drops.’ A sudden anxiety: ‘I suppose there is enough food here in the garden to keep him properly nourished?’
‘If there isn’t,’ Maud suggested nastily, ‘feed him a couple of black beetles or a few maggots. Whatever you happen to have in the house.’
May Bowden ignored the affront. She kissed me again, despite the smell, which made Maud hopping mad. So mad that she couldn’t wait to lam into me the moment we were away, crossing the courtyard towards our own back door.
‘A fine thing!’ she exploded. ‘My brother go to all that trouble to g
et you a toad –’ she made it sound as if he had scaled Everests, swum Hellesponts – ‘an’ first chance you get, you go and give it away to that old bag of rubbish.’
‘I didn’t!’ I hissed, keeping my voice down in case May Bowden had her antennae raised. ‘All the time I was saying “It’s yours” I kept my fingers crossed.’
‘You old artful, you!’ I preened at her admiration. She put an arm round my shoulders and gave me a small hug. ‘Tha’s all right, then.’
My parents were not yet back. The house was dark. Maud hung the cowslip ball on the hallstand, to surprise my mother on her return.
Perhaps doubly put on her mettle by May Bowden’s aspersions, she not only supervised my bath as if I were still a baby, but insisted on washing my hair, which I could well have done without. When at last I was allowed into my bed, hair damp, my clothes whisked away for laundering before my mother could see them, she brought me, as custom dictated, a book for bedtime reading, for once not consulting my wishes in the matter. The book was The Frog Prince.
I was, however, too sleepy, and said so. What I didn’t say was, that for all her soaping and shampooing, I could still, when I turned my nose into the hollow of my upper arm, smell Opposite the Cross Keys on my skin: the sweet-sour smell of poverty.
Between waking and sleep, I could not decide whether to feel glad or sorry I wasn’t poor. True, it meant I shouldn’t inherit the kingdom of heaven (by ‘poor in spirit’ I understood too poor even to afford the bottle of Johnnie Walker my father kept out on the sideboard to offer visitors). But whilst it would be galling, on the Last Day, to find the gates of the Celestial City closed against me, I should at least have had May Bowden’s money on earth by way of compensation. Whether heaven was worth being poor for was a question which required further thought.
Maud came over to the bed to take The Frog Prince away. I reached up my arms, pulled her down and kissed her.
‘I do love you,’ I said.
Maud said, ‘I love you too.’ That is, what she actually said was, ‘Now what is it?’ but I knew what she meant.
I first went to Salham St Awdry to stay, not just going there for the day, more than a year later, in July, when I was getting over chickenpox. In those days, children who had contracted the disease were deemed infectious so long as any scabs remained in place, so that although I felt, and was, perfectly well, I was forced to stay away from school and forbidden all companionship of my own age, the only permissible alternatives either to stay indoors or else be smuggled out, hat pulled down over face to conceal the tell-tale evidence, to deserted places like Mousehold Heath on the edge of the city, where there was nothing to do but sit and listen to the gorse pods popping in the heat of the summer afternoon.
It was intolerable, and so was Dr Parfitt, a foolish old man whose yellow-stained moustache completely hid his mouth and came down to his chin, almost. He wore the moustache, he said, because it trapped the germs to which his profession particularly exposed him. Whenever he ran into my father, he invariably exhorted him, for his health’s sake, to grow his moustache longer. He was, however, puzzled by his female patients, finding it hard to account for the fact that, although on the whole moustacheless, they tended to outlive his male ones.
My mother said it was Dr Parfitt who first mooted the desirability of getting me away to the country – presumably, contact with country children didn’t count. It may have been he, or it may have been my mother, driven to distraction by my bored naughtiness; but I am pretty sure it was Maud’s idea. What she wanted was to get me away from May Bowden.
May Bowden was my one refuge during this trying time. When I called on her she would take me into her dining-room and bring out several small cloth bags, drawn up at the neck with a cord, whose contents she would shake out on to the green chenille cover of her dining table.
There were buttons and brooches and all manner of small trinkets, some worthless, some, as I now think, of beauty and price. One morning when I pricked my finger on a hat-pin shaped like a dagger she took me into the kitchen to wash and bandage the wound. Because I had been so brave, she said – I carefully omitting to point out that I was years beyond fussing over such small mishaps – I might choose any one thing to take home and keep.
I chose a tiny carved mouse, curled nose to tail, no bigger than a button. And that was what it was, my father told me when I showed it to him, one of the Japanese toggles called netsuke. It was valuable, he said, and I ought to give it back, but my mother said May Bowden would only be offended, and it wasn’t as if she couldn’t afford it. What had begun to worry my mother a little – she spoke diffidently, for she had difficulty in speaking ill of anybody – was whether it was safe for me to be alone in the house with that dotty old maid.
It did not take much in the way of brains to discern behind this misgiving the fine Italian hand of Maud. Maud even tried to stop me visiting Pillow in the garden, asserting it to be cruelty to wild animals to treat them as pets, brushing aside my insistence that, on the contrary, the little creature looked forward to my coming. When none of her devices succeeded she changed tack, and began to speak of asking Tom whether he couldn’t find a she-toad to keep poor lonely Pillow company. I was not deceived. What really moved her, I could swear, was a wicked desire to see her rival’s garden awash with baby toads, a mini-plague such as, on a grander scale, had afflicted the Ancient Egyptians. I think she hoped that if only there were enough of them it might induce May Bowden to tell me, as Pharaoh had told the Israelites, get out of my sight for God’s sake: never darken my door again.
Only two weeks remained of the summer term when it was decided that I was to go to St Awdrey’s, returning to Norwich in September, hopefully a new girl. Terms were struck, Mrs Fenner paying me the compliment of offering to take me for nothing (which I overheard my sorely tried brother Alfred say was about all I was worth in my present frame of mind). Arrangements were made for the carrier to drop off extra supplies every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Nothing was said about family visits, it being tacitly understood that a little respite from each other’s company would be good for all of us. I was, after all, going to be no more than four miles from home, and Maud would be down every Sunday to report on how I was getting along and whether I needed anything.
That Maud, my handmaiden and footstool, was not coming with me was the biggest surprise of the whole arrangement. Unable to envisage any other life but one in which she was perpetually within call, I had not noticed, as I grew older, that her primary function of nurserymaid had been progressively subsumed by those of cook, housekeeper, Supreme Being. Mrs Hewitt still came every Monday and Tuesday to do the washing and the ironing, but the services of a dim creature called Edie, whose duties consisted principally of doing down the stairs and whitestoning the front step, had been dispensed with; Maud rising that little bit earlier to ensure that no one, not even the postman on his first round, should see one of her exalted status performing such a menial task.
Once I had got over the shock, the prospect of Opposite the Cross Keys sans Maud grew ever more delectable, though at the same time a little unnerving. The prospect of freedom, which I had been taught was a good thing, even though I was not quite sure what it was, nor what you did with it once you got it, excited me. Freedom that meant not having Maud telling you what to do, telling you what not to do. Freedom that meant, the reverse of the coin, having to tell yourself what to do, and taking the consequences.
One day after dinner, as Maud was changing her morning apron for her fancy afternoon one with lace round the edges, I put my arms round her.
‘I do wish you were coming with me,’ I said, meaning it just at that moment; and also, not meaning it. At that time of life, believing two contradictory propositions simultaneously presented no problems. Life was a thousand different roads along which one could travel at one and the same time.
‘Mind what you’re doing to that apron!’ She unclasped my arms firmly, but her eyes were gentle. ‘There’s worse danger
s at sea. You’ll get used to it.’
‘I won’t, you know. I shall miss you dreadfully.’
‘Tell us another!’
Two days before I was due to leave, something awful happened. My scabs fell off, all together. I woke up in the morning and there they were, on my pillow, dot, dot, dot. With them went the whole raison d’être for my visit to St Awdry’s. I would be sent back to school. I wasn’t infectious any more.
Dr Parfitt and his moustache were due after breakfast to pronounce finally on my fitness for the journey. It was a time for desperate measures.
With my right hand I delicately removed the shed scabs from the pillow, transferring them one at a time to my left palm which I kept extended flat in front of me. Choosing quiet floorboards which wouldn’t inform Maud I was up, I tiptoed over to the dressing table and fished out the jar of glue I kept in one of the small drawers which flanked the central mirror.
The scabs were aggravatingly brittle, the glue maddeningly gooey, but I persevered. By the time the last fleck of scab had disintegrated into dust I had glued the greater number of them back in place. My face, scabby, infectious, smiled back at me in triumph even as I heard Maud’s step upon the stair.
In fact, I looked scabbier than ever, thanks to frilly little edgings of glue which outlined the scabs rather as Maud’s lace outlined her afternoon apron. Dr Parfitt looked at me thoughtfully, riffled through his moustache as if looking for his prescription pad, and prescribed his runny cream. He had two in his repertoire – one the consistency of dumpling batter, the other more like a stiff pastry mix. Maud always contended that his selection of one rather than the other depended on what his wife had had over from dinner the day before.