by S. T. Haymon
But it turned out all right. When Mrs Fenner went back to complain, once the shop opened up again after the holidays, the shopkeeper, a formidable woman, swore that the cake was as fresh as a daisy. However, when Mrs Fenner threatened to hurl the object in dispute at the shop window, and then they’d find out how fresh it was, or wasn’t, as the case might be, she gave back the money, which Mrs Fenner promptly expended in groceries, to show there was no ill will.
I arranged with Tom to go and cut some holly for me to take back to St Giles: he was off work early that afternoon. It was, as always, restful to be in the company of one so at peace with the world. The bright blue eyes in the lovely cherub’s face looked at every stick and stone as if seeing it for the first time, and finding it wonderful beyond words. The fields glittered with frost, a gossamer mist clinging to the beeches, as we made our way along Back Lane, past the allotments and the cemetery, to where the best hollies stuck up at intervals along the hedgerows.
Alas, we had left it too late. One plundered tree after the other proclaimed that others had been before us. It was a wonderful year for holly berries. Faced with such plenty, the vandals had been choosy, discarding some branches for others more fructiferous. More upset at Tom’s plaintively voiced disappointment than by the shortage of really ‘good’ holly, I began to gather up some of the rejected pieces strewn about the verges.
‘These will do.’
‘No, they won’t!’ The lovely face had become contorted with anger. ‘Measly things like that!’ Tom snatched the holly out of my hands and threw it on the ground. I knew better than to argue. ‘We’ll go over by Jackson’s,’ he declared. ‘The best un of all’s down over by Jackson’s.’
The tree in one of the boundary hedges of Jackson’s farm was indeed a nonpareil among hollies. But here again the wreckers had been at work. All the reachable parts of the tree had been gone over with such thoroughness that scarcely a berry remained visible. Only at the top, where a thick core poked through, rather as if a Lombardy poplar were sticking up through the tree’s middle, were there trusses of berries too good to be true, and too high up, too difficult for anyone’s taking.
I had reckoned without Tom.
‘What I tell you?’ he shouted, and began climbing.
To watch that dreadful ascent in silence was impossible, yet I was afraid to call out, to shout up that Maud had said positively no holly that year, the way it scratched the wallpaper and the picture frames. I was afraid to call out because, every now and again, emerging and disappearing among the holly leaves, Tom’s face showed, transformed with a determination so utter I knew it was deadly dangerous to make a sound. ‘Please!’ was all I could mutter, under my breath, praying to anyone who might be listening.
The holly tree did not let its last precious cargo go without a fight. Its branches reached for Tom’s old greatcoat, slitting the buttonholes, ripping off the epaulettes, tearing the pockets from their anchorage. Crackling insult, the leaves went for his neck, his eyes, his hands. Blood ran down his face, the same colour as the berries. Into my mind unbidden came a picture from one of my favourite legends: Baldur the Beautiful, killed by a shaft of mistletoe, his blood dripping on to the holly berries, turning them red for all time. It was less a holly gathering than a crucifixion.
Ellie was the only one home at Opposite the Cross Keys. She stopped combing her hair when we came in.
‘You got yourself in a fine mess,’ she remarked to Tom, before setting to again.
I went through the scullery with him and out to the back, where I pumped some water. There was so much blood in his eyes you couldn’t have told they were blue. I was afraid he had been blinded. He bent over the bucket and splashed water over his face and neck until he was wet all down his front. He was in great spirits.
‘We got it, didn’t we? I reckon you won’t find anyone in Norwich wi’ holly better ’n that.’
‘I’ll tell everyone how brave you were to get it.’
He wasn’t blinded, and though his face looked flayed, his injuries, so far as I could judge, were superficial. There was no first-aid box at Opposite the Cross Keys, but Tom found an old tube of ointment the vet had once prescribed for Gyp, and he put on some of that, and seemed to find it soothing.
He also found some twine with which he went outside and tied the holly, which he had dumped outside the front door, on to the back of my bike. I watched the leaves and the sharp ends of the branches incising deep lines into the paint of the mudguard, but I didn’t say anything.
I felt deathly tired. The sun was setting, low and large and red, itself an outsize holly berry. I wondered where I would find the strength to cycle home before dark. Or after.
I roused myself to say, ‘Don’t tie it all on. You must keep some for yourselves.’
Tom paused in his task, genuinely puzzled.
‘Us?’ he said. ‘The likes of us don’t put up holly.’
I said, ‘Christmas is for everyone.’
‘Oh ah,’ he said, pulling the last knot tight.
I rode back to Norwich painfully, every small rise a mountain slope. All the way, I could hear the holly taking its revenge on the mudguard. By the time I came up to Horsford Point the last ray of the sun was full on the signboard and I saw beyond peradventure that, whatever I might have thought in the past, it read, for then and thereafter, MANN EGERTON FOR CARS and nothing else.
Without getting off my bike, I bowed my head to the victorious Mann, and continued on my way.
Chapter Twenty-five
One evening in May I sat in Maud’s room in my vest and knickers while she turned up the hem of one of my new school dresses, pale mauve linen with a white collar, programmed with that expensive dowdiness exclusive to schools for the daughters of the gentry. (Eldon House was bourgeois to the core, but no matter: the ideal was all.) In summer, Maud’s bedroom, under the tiles, was hot to unbearable: in winter, cold to ditto. In spring it was, to my way of thinking, the pleasantest room in the house with its dormer window giving on to a panoramic view down the hill to the Guildhall and over the roof-tops.
I lounged on Maud’s bed with its white honeycomb cover, idly turning the pages of The School Friend, waiting for it to be time to try on again. Maud, stitching away in the little embrasure under the window, put her sewing down, got up to push the casement wide. She leaned her forearms on the sill and looked out for a moment, into the soft evening. Immediately her voice burst forth in surprise and alarm. ‘Here come my brother Charlie!’ Leaning out until I feared her gaunt body would disappear over the edge: ‘Charlie! Charlie!’
What on earth could be up? That something was, neither of us doubted for a moment. Charlie never came to St Giles. Yet here he was. Something must be dreadfully up.
Maud flew to the door, pausing only to warn me not to dare to follow without first making myself decent. I heard her afternoon shoes with their louis heels clonking downstairs at untypical speed, noisy on the bare treads of the uppermost storey, quieter on the Turkey carpeting below. I ran to my bedroom, stuck head and arms through the first dress I could lay hands on, and hurried down to the kitchen.
Charlie, very red in the face, was ensconced in Maud’s special chair, looking important. Having apparently satisfied herself that nobody was dead or dying, Maud had forbidden further reportage until the demands of hospitality had been satisfied. Bursting with curiosity, I was forced to wait until the kettle had boiled, the tea been brewed, a slice of fruit cake cut and arranged on a flowered china plate, before Charlie was permitted to let us know the purpose of his call.
And what a story he had to tell! First, did we know that Chicken had finished his boat? Maud and I looked at each other. Well, we did know and we didn’t. For the last three weeks it had indeed looked finished, bright with varnish, the cabin furnished, to a very spartan specification certainly, but with a kettle and crockery of sorts in the galley, pillow and army surplus blankets on the two bunks covered with red American cloth.
Whatever Maud knew
(and it was years before she confided that Chicken had promised her the boat was to be called the Lady Maud), I knew that, whatever the outward appearances, it couldn’t be finished so long as no name, no Lady Sylvie, was to be seen on its bow. Much as I yearned to be thus celebrated, the boat’s completion was something I dreaded. I wanted it to go on a-building for ever. I had grown used to that in-curving, out-curving shape enthroned on its blocks like a reigning god. In a sense, though I had had nothing to do with its actual manufacture, I had made it: my longings, my dreams, the muddled aspirations of my growing mind and body were all embodied in that tubby little craft which did indeed – it must have been to PC Utting’s satisfaction – look like an enlarged version of a toy Noah’s ark. It would have been no surprise to find that the roof lifted off the red-painted cabin to disclose wooden animals you could take out two by two, and a Mr and Mrs Noah looking worried because the dove had not yet returned with the olive leaf in its beak.
So long, then, as the boat remained at Opposite the Cross Keys, anything and everything was possible: St Giles, Eldon House, slotted without friction into life with Chicken by the bank of some Broadland river or – engine or no engine, mast or no mast – sailing down to Rio, rounding the Horn, peering through jewelled water for an opening in the Great Barrier Reef. But once the boat was gone, and Chicken with it –! My mind refused even to contemplate the possibility.
That very afternoon, Charlie said, when nobody was at home except Ellie, there had been a noise, an explosion, which had brought half St Awdry’s out of doors in a panic. Even the Harleys, deaf as a post, both of them, had come out of their cottage at the end of the row to see what was up. The licensee of the Cross Keys, opposite, had been sure an aeroplane had fallen out of the sky. PC Utting wouldn’t have been surprised to find it was the end of the world.
In fact, it was the derelict cottage. With the aid of some small explosive charges, artfully bestowed, Chicken had demolished the entire front wall. It hadn’t taken much doing, considering its already dilapidated condition, though the dust generated had still caught Charlie in the throat hours later, when he came back from work. Then, the first person to meet him with the news had been Mrs Leach from next door, hysterical because the crash had pitched her Welsh dresser over on to the floor and she didn’t have so much as an eggcup left in one piece.
By that time the Fire Brigade had been summoned from Norwich, and men were already shovelling the debris into a lorry. Other workmen were doing some emergency shoring-up of the adjoining walls of the Leaches’ and the Fenners’ cottages, which were showing a distinct tendency to lean towards each other over the newly created space between. In the Fenners’ cottage, the two grandads had fallen off the wall and smashed their glass, that was all.
‘All!’ Maud echoed, aghast.
Was Chicken safe?
‘He were all right, the clever ole bugger.’ Charlie settled back to his tale. It appeared that, a short while before the explosion, a brewers’ dray, drawn by two Shire horses and attended by two large men in leather aprons, had arrived in the village, and pulled up by the pond. The dray had attracted some attention because its owners, Bullards’ – the name was painted on the sides – supplied beer to neither of the village pubs. One of the two men slipped nosebags over the horses’ heads whilst the other, the driver, sat puffing peaceably on his pipe.
The crowd which quickly collected after the blast was not kept long in doubt of the dray’s true purpose. Inside what was left of the shattered cottage, Chicken could be seen, spade in hand, systematically shoving aside the rubble so as to make way for a kind of makeshift trackway which he laid down carefully, in several interlocking sections, all the way from the boat, shrouded in tarpaulins, to the edge of the road. When these preparations seemed to be accomplished to his satisfaction he stepped out into the middle of the High Street, put two fingers to his mouth and whistled – a signal the men on the dray were evidently waiting for. The driver put up a large thumb as evidence that he had heard and understood, his companion removed the nosebags and took hold of the horses’ halters. Slowly, the two brought the pair round, and the dray with them; moved slowly back down the road until they came abreast of the ruin, where the manoeuvre was repeated, so that the conveyance finished up facing towards Cromer. The brake back on, the two brewery workers unlatched the back of the dray, and then joined Chicken to help with the next stage.
Slowly and carefully – the track must have been well waxed, for after some initial difficulty the vessel moved smoothly enough – the three of them brought the boat forth into the light of day; and then, its dust protection discarded, drew it up the ramp and on to the wide loading area, where they anchored it with ropes and padding. By this time the onlookers had cottoned on to the object of the exercise, and there were many willing hands to help them get the boat safely cradled. Only PC Utting hung about fretfully, unsure whether there was anything he could properly arrest Chicken for, and apparently coming to the conclusion that there wasn’t. When everything was ready for departure somebody raised a ragged cheer. It did the heart good, as old Mr Harley unexpectedly told Charlie later, to see something actually happen in the derned ole place.
Charlie stopped talking and, again, Maud and I looked at each other, our hearts too full for words. What we both wanted, I think, more than anything else, was for Charlie to say goodbye and go, leaving the two of us to work out what the intelligence he had brought was going to mean to us. But Charlie showed no sign of making a move.
On the contrary, his demeanour changed, he seemed at a loss for what to say. But that he had something more that had to be said was only too evident.
Maud demanded, ‘Tha’s all, is it?’ And when Charlie fiddled with his cap peak and didn’t answer, sharply: ‘What else is there, then?’
What else, indeed!
Stumblingly, Charlie recounted the rest. At the last moment Chicken had gone into Opposite the Cross Keys and emerged with Ellie, an Ellie got up in her cotton dress and long brown cardigan; the straw hat with the poppies on her head, and in her hand a brand-new fibre suitcase crammed, presumably, with her belongings. There being no room on the box for more than two, he handed her ceremoniously up the dray ramp, himself following after, unfolding two canvas chairs he had been carrying under his other arm – one for her, one for himself. The driver’s assistant lifted the ramp back into place, bolted it and returned to his seat. The driver gathered up his reins and, with a click of the teeth, set his beautiful beasts in motion. The boat, with Chicken and Ellie, side by side, waving and nodding like royalty to all who saw them on their way, receded up the Cromer road, bound for God alone knew where.
Well, not only God. Somehow or other, the word had got about that Chicken had taken his boat to the Bure, to a mooring a little below Buxton. Mr Fenner, stately on his three-wheeler, had ridden the six or seven miles over there that very evening, to ask what Chicken intended to do to make his daughter an honest woman, to which the answer had been ‘Nothing.’ Mr Fenner had returned shaken, and retired into his private fog, Old Moore open on his knees.
My mother gave Maud a couple of days off to comfort her mother, whilst I – it was half-term, May, the sweetest time of the year – hung about the house wondering who was going to comfort me.
I finally decided that Chicken had had to take Ellie. He had to have somebody to cook his meals, wash his underwear, darn his socks. The fact that Ellie couldn’t cook water, seldom, if ever, washed her own underwear, let alone his, and didn’t know a darn from a drainpipe did not deter my luxuriant imaginings. Ellie was no more to Chicken than Mrs Hewitt was to my mother – somebody you paid (or, more likely in Chicken’s case, didn’t) to do the jobs you couldn’t be fagged to do yourself.
I couldn’t have said, next morning, when I wheeled my bicycle out of the shed, if my intention in riding out to Buxton was to offer myself in Ellie’s stead or not. My cooking was probably no better than hers, and I couldn’t darn. The prospect of laundering Chicken’s smalls did not
appeal. Let us say, I went because I went, and leave it at that.
I did not stop at Opposite the Cross Keys, did not even slow down: barely spared a glance for the gaping hole next door. Kept on through Norgate, past the gypsy encampment, the cowslip field, past all that Salham St Awdry meant to me.
At Stratton Strawless I turned right on to the Buxton road, wearying a little as the miles receded under my tyres, but spirits rising despite myself. There was blossom everywhere – in the orchards, in the hedgerows. Even in the shadowy woods blossom drew arabesques upon the gloom. I felt that I could easily bud and blossom myself if I could only get the hang of it.
In Buxton village I inquired at the Post Office for any boat arrived by brewers’ dray in the past couple of days. The smiling woman to whom I addressed my inquiry directed me without hesitation. Past the mill, a little up towards Lamas, then take the right and the left and the right again. ‘Whenever you find there’s a road crossing over, m’ dear, take the narrowest one and you won’t go wrong.’
I passed by the mill, took the right and the left and the right again, by which time the ‘road’ had dwindled to a cart track between clouds of cow parsley in full flower, along which I was forced to cycle now one side of the central hump, now the other, according to the disposition of pot-holes. Whichever route the dray had taken, it could not have been this.
I was glad it had not tried to come this way, for its passage would have wrought mayhem among the white lace which fringed the path like a bridal veil. I was really tired by now, so I got down from my bike and pushed it, pleased to move half-submerged among the furrowed stems, at the top of which flower parasols swayed, each petal point like the white satin pumps of a well-rehearsed corps de ballet, turned in at precisely the same angle. Between the delicate stalks of each umbel, I could see a sky so blue it had to be one more figment of my imagination. I could not think how anyone could be unhappy.