The Swish of the Curtain

by Pamela Brown

  “What have you got there?” Nigel asked, pointing to the box.

  The boy understood and shifted the box down on to his knee. Inside it lay rows and rows of brown, earthy bulbs.

  “Are they tulips?”

  Still the boy just grinned.

  “Try it in French,” advised Sandra.

  “Est-ce qu’ils sont des tulipes?”

  The boy nodded, but did not answer, and a man shouted to him from the boat; he continued his journeys to and fro. They decided that he must be the cabin boy of the Dutch ship.

  The heat was terrific, and as they sank down on some large empty oil drums Jeremy said, mopping his brow, “Thank goodness I’m not carting boxes of bulbs.”

  “We shall be translating Caesar in a fortnight’s time,” Bulldog remarked morosely.

  “I bags we forbid any reference to school during the rest of the holidays,” Lyn suggested.

  “Carried unanimously.”

  When it was time to turn back Maddy begged, “Do let’s go back through the slums.” The dock back streets of Fenchester were unashamedly referred to, even by their inhabitants, as the slums, though their names were celestial enough. “Manna Court”, “Heavensgate Street”, and “Paradise Yard” could beat the East End of London for poverty. The streets were narrow and winding, and great warehouses had sprung up between little cottages that now looked as if choked and struggling for air.

  They were walking along in the middle of the road, for the pavement was narrow, and in some places still cobbled, when an errand boy on a bicycle came into sight. Although this was no remarkable occurrence, the seven stared as he approached on a rickety bicycle with an immense basket on the front. His hair was a flaming red, more ginger than the twins’ hair, or than any other hair in Fenchester. His prominent eyes were pale blue in colour.

  As he rode past Maddy remarked, just too loudly, “Talk about a red herring!”

  He heard, and, making a terrifying face, responded with one scathing epithet, “Fatty!”

  There was nothing that annoyed Maddy more than references to her plump little person. She gave a sob of rage, and picking up a large piece of slate that was lying in the road, she threw it at him with all the force she had.

  “Don’t!” Lyn shouted, but too late. The missile hurtled out of Maddy’s hand, but in quite the wrong direction. There was a crash as the boy turned the corner and disappeared. Maddy gasped and burst into tears. The others swung round.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Maddy sobbed and pointed to the side of the road. They looked and saw, squashed between two warehouses, a little one-storied building of wood. There were two grimy steps up to the front door, which had originally been blue and was now a dirty grey. On the door was a battered notice, “The All Souls Brethren Chapel. Meetings every Sabbath”, and in the left-hand window was a jagged hole where Maddy’s stone had found its mark.

  They stood dumbfounded while Maddy cried quietly and miserably.

  “Look what you’ve done!” said Sandra at last.

  “I didn’t mean to,” Maddy sobbed. “I meant to hit that horrid boy.”

  “Well, it hasn’t spoilt the look of the place much,” Bulldog remarked.

  “What had we better do?” Sandra appealed anxiously to Nigel.

  “We must find out who is the rector or minister or whatever they call the boss of a chapel.”

  “Don’t let anyone see it till we’ve reported it,” Jeremy advised.

  “I’ll stand in front of it,” Bulldog offered.

  “Right-o, and we’ll go into the shop opposite and ask about it.”

  Nigel led the way into the cheap eating-house across the road, leaving Bulldog leaning against the creosoted wooden wall with his head in front of the smashed pane of frosted glass. He put his hands in his pockets and whistled innocently, gazing into the sky as if this were his sole vocation in life. The errand boy passed again, and eyed him suspiciously, but apart from a few scraggy cats there was no other life in the road.

  Inside the shop Nigel bought a bar of chocolate with a penny of Maddy’s last three halfpennies, and asked the enormous old lady behind the counter “How’s trade?” She shook her head ponderously. “Bad, sir, bad. Very bad. Not what it used to be.” She sniffed sadly, screwing up her heavy-featured face into a thousand wrinkles and furrows.

  “Is the chapel opposite anything to do with the chapel up Forrester Road way?” he asked conversationally. The woman was ready to gossip, for she had taken a liking to this handsome, polite boy, who treated her with such gentlemanly deference.

  “No, sir, that it ain’t. That ain’t been open these three years. The last minister, ’e was ’ad up for forging banknotes. And he was such a nice man. The ’all useter be reg’lar packed, and ’e cured Mrs. Cuttleberry, what live across the road o’ me; ’e cured ’er rheumatics something wunnerful.”

  “Who does the hall belong to now?”

  “I couldn’t rightly say, sir. Brother Irving, that being as ’ow he useter call ’imself, ’e bought the ’all with ’is own money, but being as ’ow ’e’s in prison I couldn’t rightly say.”

  Nigel paid for the chocolate and they trooped out of the shop.

  “It smelt like fried onions and washing-up water,” said Lyn distastefully.

  “What news?” asked Bulldog, still with his head over the hole.

  “It doesn’t seem to belong to anyone, as the former minister has been in prison for three years.”

  “But we must do something about the window,” Sandra pointed out.

  “Let’s see what it’s like inside.” Bulldog peered in through the hole. “It’s awfully dark. I can’t see much. Yes, I can. There are rows of chairs and a high platform at the other end.”

  They each took a turn in looking.

  “Thank goodness it’s a pretty small pane of glass. We ought to be able to mend it ourselves.” Nigel measured the pane roughly with his fingers. “Yes, it’s about ten inches by six. We could buy a piece of glass that size and easily fix it in with putty. I think I could do it.”

  “There’s a lump of putty in our shed,” Jeremy observed, “and if we go round to Blake’s workshop we might pick up a bit of glass on the cheap.”

  “That’s the trouble – money,” Lyn was despondent.

  “I,” Maddy exclaimed suddenly, “have a birthday on Saturday!”

  The situation was saved. Maddy would pay for the glass with her birthday money. Nigel marked the length and breadth of the pane on a piece of paper.

  “But I shall pay you some, Maddy, when I get some,” Vicky told her.

  “And I shall pay a little, too,” added Nigel.

  “If Nigel pays, I shall,” put in Jeremy.

  “So shall I.” This was Bulldog.

  “Well I shall, because I ought to have been looking after Maddy better,” said Sandra.

  “I shall help if Sandra does,” Lyn remarked; “so it won’t cost anyone much.”

  “But what shall we do about it till Saturday? We’ll have to mend it in the morning, because we’re going to the vicarage in the afternoon.”

  They thought in vain for some way of covering up the hole.

  “Bulldog will have to stand in front of it day and night,” Maddy suggested.

  “Impracticable,” said Bulldog.

  “I know,” Vicky exclaimed. In the road there lay a handbill advertising a film appearing at the Palace Cinema. She picked it up. “Stick this over it and people won’t notice anything.”

  “Good idea,” applauded Nigel; “but what shall we stick it with?”

  “Stamp paper,” Jeremy said, producing a stamp book from his wallet.

  Carefully they stuck the bill up so that the whole broken pane was covered.

  “Super,” was Jeremy’s verdict, as he stepped back to see the final effect.

  “H’m-h’mm,” Lyn coughed to attract their attention. “The time,” she said, “is five past one.”

  With squeals of surprise they turn
ed and hurried towards home. Maddy panted along at the rear, occasionally breaking into a trot to keep up.

  “Life,” she puffed sadly, “is just one thing after another.”

  4

  VICARAGE TEA PARTY

  Maddy opened her eyes and wondered why she felt excited. Of course! It was her birthday.

  “Fancy me being alive nine years!” she thought, “and I may live ten times this amount of years.”

  She heard the postman come, and bounced up and down with expectation. Then Mrs. Fayne shouted up the stairs, “You awake, Maddy? There are some letters for you.”

  “How many?”

  “Four and a little parcel.”

  She jumped out of bed and pattered along to the bathroom for a “lick and a promise”. When she came back Sandra was seated on the bed in a camel-hair dressing-gown.

  “Many happy returns, Maddy.”

  “Thanks. Have you got a present for me?”

  Sandra shook her head sadly but her eyes were merry. “No. You know I’m broke.”

  But when Maddy sat down to breakfast there were five big parcels and a little one and four letters beside her plate. Inside the first parcel, a thin, flat one, was a book of paper dolls with clothes that you painted, then cut out and put on the little cardboard figures. On the outside was written, “With love from Sandra”. Maddy was delighted, and when she opened the next parcel and found that it contained an enormous paint box from her father she was so delighted that she knocked over her bowl of grapefruit.

  “What a good job it’s my birthday,” she said, watching the patch of juice spread over the tablecloth. The other presents proved to be a book of animal stories (from her uncle) and a large furry lion with a zip down its tummy, where you opened the nightdress case that he held inside him. The last was from her mother.

  “I’ll christen it Henrietta after you, Mummy,” she said.

  “It’s not a lady lion, ’cause it’s got a mane,” Sandra informed her.

  “I’ll call it Henry, then.”

  She opened one of the envelopes with trembling fingers, assailed by the dreadful thought it might contain only a birthday card and no money. Then she heard the crisp crackle of paper. It was a ten-shilling note! Her eyes sparkled, and she tried to kick Sandra under the table.

  “Mind my best shoes,” said her father from behind the Daily Telegraph.

  “Sorry,” Maddy apologized meekly.

  The other letters were birthday cards from her friends, and the little parcel which had been put through the door just before the postman’s visit bore the label, “With love from the Halfords and Darwins”. Inside was a mouth-organ. Maddy blew delighted discords on it. Mr. Fayne put his hands over his ears. “Good heavens! Fancy anyone being so misguided as to give you an instrument of torture like that.” But, all the same, when she offered him a blow he did not refuse.

  Directly she had finished her egg she asked, “Will you excuse Sandra and me, Mummy?”

  “Yes, dear, as long as you don’t go spending a lot of your money.”

  “I think,” put in Mr. Fayne, “that I had better look after some of that for you.”

  “Oh no!” Maddy’s eyes dilated with horror, and quickly she stuffed it down the elephant’s trunk of her money-box. “There, it’s safe now.”

  “Yes, as long as you don’t lose the box.”

  Sandra and Maddy flung on their blazers, and crawling through the hole in the fence, banged on the Darwins’ back door. Jeremy opened it, but with no welcoming words, for his mouth was full. He chewed silently, and, when he was able, said, “Sorry. Bread and marmalade. What do you want?”

  “Thanks for your part of the mouth-organ, and look what I’ve got.” Maddy held up the elephant.

  “He’s lovely,” said Jeremy disinterestedly.

  “It’s not the box, it’s what’s in it,” Sandra explained.

  “It’s money,” went on Maddy excitedly, “to pay for the—”

  “Sh!” Jeremy, comprehending at last, glanced nervously over his shoulder and drew the door to behind him.

  “We want to get it out, and it’s the kind you have to take the bottom off, so can we get out the nails in your shed?”

  “Wait a tick and I’ll come and do it for you.”

  He went inside, calling, “Lyn, here are Maddy and Sandra.” They both appeared a few minutes later, Jeremy without his table napkin.

  In the shed, which smelt of bicycle tyres and blacking, they took the elephant to pieces.

  “Let’s pretend we’re doctors doing an operation for appendicitis,” Maddy suggested. She stuffed her hankie down his trunk. “Look, I’ve given him an anaesthetic.”

  “The surgeon now applies the knife,” said Jeremy, sliding his penknife under the joining of the base. Gently he levered off the bottom, and the note fluttered out.

  “Now we must go round to Blake’s and get the glass. Here’s the putty.”

  He picked up a dirty grey lump from the bench, and would have put it in his pocket but Maddy took it from him.

  “What lovely stuff! How I’d like to throw it at Mrs. Potter-Smith.”

  “Why this sudden aversion to Mrs. P.-S.?” Jeremy wanted to know.

  Maddy pouted. “She told Mummy I was a ‘bonny little girl’. Me! Bonny! Ugh!”

  “Bonny is only another word for fat,” said Jeremy teasingly.

  At that moment he was getting through the fence, and in so tempting a position that Maddy could not resist giving him a kick.

  They went round the side of the Faynes’ house, out at the front gate, and down to the Corner House. Vicky was doing her usual half-hour acrobatic practice in the garden, attired in a blouse under a bathing costume. She was in a back-bend when they scrunched up the gravel path.

  “You look funny upside down,” she greeted them.

  “No funnier than you do.”

  “It’s not ten, is it?” This was their usual time for going out.

  “No,” Jeremy explained, “but you know what we’ve got to do this morning, and Maddy’s got the money.”

  “Oh, goody.” Vicky got up and ran into the house, calling over her shoulder, “Take a seat.” They sat down on the grass, and a few minutes later were joined by Nigel and Bulldog.

  “Where’s Vick?” Lyn asked.

  “Making herself look respectable.”

  She came out a few minutes later in a green linen frock looking neat and tidy and altogether as if she had never heard the word “acrobatic”.

  “Now what are we going to do, exactly?” Nigel wanted to know. “We can’t go and mend it quite openly.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well – we just couldn’t.”

  “I think we could,” Lyn disagreed. “If anyone asked what we were up to we should just say we broke the window and were mending it. That’s perfect truth, and if we mend it there’s no blame on us.”

  “True, O King,” said Nigel thoughtfully.

  Sandra voiced her opinion, saying, “I bags we do it openly, because it’s no sin to break a window.”

  “O.K. Let’s go.” Nigel jumped up, pulling Sandra after him, and they all started off for Blake’s workshop.

  “I’ll go in,” Jeremy offered, “because he is a friend of mine.”

  Maddy handed over the note that she had been holding tightly screwed up in her fist.

  “Where’s the paper you measured the window by?” he asked Nigel. Nigel produced it.

  While they were waiting for him to come out, Maddy found a litter basket attached to a lamp-post.

  “Aha!” she thought, “where there are litter baskets there are usually empty cigarette packets, and where there are cigarette packets there are cigarette cards.” She plunged both arms into the rubbish it contained. The others leaning against some railings, talking idly, were startled by a pained yelp. Maddy, with a finger in her mouth, was hopping round in circles.

  “I’ve been stung, I’ve been stung,” she squealed.

  “Oh, you poor little
thing,” Sandra swooped on her sympathetically. “Let’s have a look. Oh, it’s not very bad. Suck it.”

  “I’ll iodine it,” Nigel offered. “I’ve got my first-aid set with me.”

  This alarmed Maddy more than the actual sting. “I’ll bite you if you bring iodine near me,” she threatened.

  “What a sweet child!” Jeremy mocked her.

  “Be quiet, Jeremy, it’s her birthday,” Lyn remonstrated.

  “However did it happen?” Sandra wanted to know. Maddy explained. “Well, you must expect wasps in rubbish baskets.”

  Jeremy came out of Blake’s with a satisfied air, carrying a parcel and jingling coins in his hand.

  “A very successful transaction. He only charged me half a crown!” The others expressed delight. “Don’t clap me, I know I’m good. And furthermore he’s given me some hints on putting in panes.”

  “Good work!” Nigel commended, and they made their way towards the hall.

  They found the bill still covering the hole in the window and the same air of derelict misery over the whole street as on their former visit. Nigel and Jeremy took off their coats and set to work at once, while Maddy modelled little men out of the putty.

  “I’m going to explore,” Bulldog decided. “Do you think I could squeeze round the side and get to the back of the place?”

  “I shan’t come and lever you out if you stick,” Vicky warned him.

  The space between the side of the hall and the next-door building was very narrow, but somehow Bulldog managed to contract his thick, stocky body and squash it into the aperture.

  “If I don’t come back I leave all to you, Lyn.”

  “Delighted, I’m sure.”

  The older girls walked down the street a little way and found a second-hand clothes shop of very meagre dimensions.

  “Whoever would buy such revolting looking garments as those?” Vicky wanted to know.

  “The lady in the café over the road looks as if she might do so,” Lyn remarked.

  “Confound the thing!” said Jeremy savagely as the piece of frosted glass slipped for the third time.

  “Shall I play helpful tunes on my mouth-organ?” Maddy offered.

  “Please don’t.”