What Was Promised

by Tobias Hill

  ‘Klaw Redneval,’ Jem whispers. It would be a good name for a troll.

  ‘I’m going, then!’ Floss yells. ‘I’ll go to Long Debris without you!’

  He listens to her leave. He chews his lip and turns a page. At first he still thinks of her – wishes he could be with her – but soon Jem is gone, too. He is in other times and worlds. Nothing – not Floss or Uncle Neville or the worry of the bombs – can ever reach him there.

  There were many paths that led up into those mountains, and many passes over them. But most of the paths were cheats and deceptions and lead nowhere or to bad ends; and most of the passes were infested by evil things and dreadful dangers.

  *

  Michael is receiving goods. Noakes’s man unloads the pots and together they haul them inside.

  He doesn’t talk much, this man. On Saturdays he brings potted plants. On Sundays he comes back with cut flowers and blooms, and once a month – more, when trade’s brisk – the shaving goods Michael shifts six days a week in the Roman Road. Nine loads a month, and hardly a word. Sometimes they share cigarettes, but even that’s more smoke than talk. The man could speak Latin at home for all Michael knows or cares.

  Michael approves of him.

  One of these days he won’t need Noakes, his dour man or his neat-handed boys. He’ll buy as he wishes and earn for himself. He’s a fellow of his own already – not that Noakes will hear of that – and if one man will obey, why not others? For now he’ll do as the masterman asks, but it grates on him to serve, and to serve a man like Cyril Noakes – thick wits, small mind, no more thought than where the next meal’s coming from –

  Michael’s patience is wearing thin, and under the thinning patience lies the raw flesh of his pride. Still, all things in good time. He’ll move on in the world. He’ll be his own master one day. It can’t come soon enough.

  He goes back out to the truck, brings in the last rose columbine – the pot tucked under one arm, his weight on the horse-head stick – then rests. He’s short of room. The lock-up is already crowded with greenery and hard goods – straight and safety razors, leather strops and honing stones – and he’ll need a cool spot for the blooms. The pots will sell or they won’t, but it’s the flowers that draw the crowds, the blooms which are the dazzlers.

  He stretches – his shoulders crack; the pots are awkward work for him – and sees his younger one. She’s watering the lavenders, half hidden in the greenery. She whispers as she waters, and smiles as she whispers.

  What is it she’s whispering? Who does she think she’s whispering to? It’s time Mary put a stop to that. The child has a head on her shoulders but too many fancies in it. What age is she now? Too old for make-believe. As she waters each lavender she hunkers down, nuzzling into the green, like a cat into a hand.

  When Michael was Iris’s age he dined with silver at his father’s table.

  He thinks, again, of Miss Milne’s knife. It’s not much to be dwelling on. It was only a little thing. Still, he liked the work. The scales good pearl throughout, well cut. No piqué, no carvings of grapes or hunting hounds, no excess: only the silver cartouche with the owner’s name engraved on it. All skill and little showmanship, the one proud flourish hidden along the flat of the blade: a wild cornucopia of vines and passion flowers. Michael found that forgivable. Pride’s no sin when work’s well done.

  The marks were hard to read, but he has a knack for them; even his father would give him that. On Miss Milne’s knife they were worn thin – the blade being pure soft silver, the better to resist the tarnish – but the insignia was Aaron Hadfield’s, and the work maybe Hadfield’s own: a name worth something in itself, and the piece more than a century old, made in Sheffield, the City of Steel.

  It reminded him of Birmingham, that knife. The Lockhart workshop in the Jewellers’ Quarter. The voices of his father and Graeme and Christy, before the war, his brothers’ banter and their father’s songs rising and falling as they worked together. The life which he was meant to have and which he has been cut off from.

  He would have kept it, if he could – the knife – but it came through Noakes’s boys, not Michael’s private man. Word might have got back. It’s nice work, not that Noakes will know it. Noakes will let it go for a song. Noakes wouldn’t know nice work if you walked up and sheathed it in his throat.

  ‘Daddy,’ Iris calls, ‘look, I made room for us! Now we can put more flowers in. Isn’t it good?’

  ‘Aye,’ he says, ‘good,’ and the dear child smiles up at him, for all the world as if his words are payment made in silver.

  *

  This is the day when the Lane rests. On Saturdays alone, Middlesex and its dependent streets lose their rush and noise. The fight goes out of them. They become frail and thin, like fields where a fair has been and gone.

  Columbia Road isn’t so worn. Its market only lasts a day, and so it lives a separate life. Paul Jones makes his round, door to door, out and home to the dairy in Ezra Street. The Birdcage and the shops are open. Passersby peer in their windows. Now and then one goes in, blinking in the blue fluorescence.

  Other markets take their place. Club Row and Spitalfields, Whitechapel Waste and Kingsland Waste, the Broadway and the Roman, and half-ruined Watney Street, where Bernadette fans herself with Wells’s The Invisible Man at the stall – two pitches long – of Mr Nothing-Over-Thruppence.

  ‘Vanishing cream, Mrs Malcolm?’ Mr Nothing says, and Bernadette has to laugh, light-headed, the girl in her three months’ old and there to stay, so there already she feels like she might stay put forever: there’s no vanishing her away.

  (Sybil, Bernadette calls her: Sybil Malcolm, after her own mother; even if, as yet, this Sybil is only a dream of a child, a slip of a girl coiled in bliss, without fear or hunger.)

  ‘No!’ she says, ‘no, no,’ and she leans gingerly against the sun-warm spread of wares, the scented soap, the exercise books, the elephants carved from Authentic Alabaster. ‘I want some reading, for my son.’

  ‘He’s on to novels now, is he? My, but he’s a quick little fellow. It’ll be the grammar school for him. That one you have, that’s a page turner. My clients speak highly of it. See how he goes on with that one. Bring it back when he’s done and we’ll choose him out another.’

  Bernadette opens the book. But what devilry must happen to make a man invisible?

  ‘I don’t want him frightening himself,’ she says. ‘I don’t want him losing sleep. Do you have something educational?’

  ‘Bottles of ink,’ Mr Nothing says, and again, ‘bottles of ink,’ so that Bernadette laughs some more: he sounds so like the parrot in Neville’s pirate story. ‘Ten thousand words in every bottle, and every word an education! Or, now, there’s this by Mr Orwell, calls itself a fairy story. Very intellectual man. Or here, this is good old Strang. Round the World in Seven Days. This is the one for him.’

  ‘I’ll think on it.’

  ‘Thruppence a read, for as long as he likes –’

  ‘I’ll think on it,’ Bernadette says, and Mr Nothing tips his hat and twinkles.

  ‘I’ll keep it for you, Mrs Malcolm. I’ll put it by until you say so. You’ll come by later, now, won’t you?’

  Flatterer, Bernadette thinks. Charmer, sweet-talker, honey-tongue. But Clarence honeys his words, too, when he puts on his crown. He’s sweet enough in his old fedora, but no one’s sweeter than the Banana King.

  Towards Shadwell she slows again. A coster is selling Scotch Bonnet peppers. Peppers! Bernadette has never seen them in London: their strangeness jars her pleasantly. It’s like finding a flock of parrots wheeling around Trafalgar Square.

  The coster is a small island man. She asks the price of the peppers – too dear for such withered things, and who will buy them, here? – just to linger by their blaze of colour. It makes her think of how different her daughter’s nourishment will be – of how pale and scant it is, even now – and of the markets back home, too: but then she chides herself. Bernadette, she thinks, your
home isn’t there any more. It’s here, fair old London Town.

  She thinks of soursop. A hot, hot day, and the sweet-sour juice of June plum. Scallions and sorrel and the red rags of the ice sellers. The grater cake her nursemaid bought her, year after year, from the Green Island Grand Market on Christmas Eve. The first time Mama took her beyond the western parishes, all the way to Kingston; the markets she saw there. Redemption Ground and Queen’s – which the poor folk called Chigger Foot – and Jubilee – which they called Solas – and Coronation – which they called Duppy – oh my gosh, all the names for everything! And all the small-time higglers, selling anything under the sun, higglering and higglering all the way up Orange Street.

  Duppy Market, though . . . she never liked that name. Coronation is much better. Duppy was what they called it, still, because they went and built it on a graveyard.

  She doesn’t want to think of duppies. They’ll turn her thoughts onto Neville. The things Neville says on his bad days. Instead she narrows her eyes and thinks of Redemption Ground, willing the memories to flood her again. A hot, hot, hot day . . .

  But it’s hot here, too, in Watney Street. What’s the difference, really, between Watney and Redemption? The noise is the noise and the dust is the dust. What is there for her to be missing, here? The markets are the same. Ackee and June plum she’ll always crave; but the crowds of people of all types, and the neediness, the gaudiness, the rituals and the higgling – whatever they want to call it here – those things are all the same in Solas Market or Petticoat Lane or Whitechapel Waste or Chigger Foot. And the sweet-talk and the dazzle, that make even common things seem otherworldly and foreign.

  The market is the crossroads: wherever you go, it’s the same. Any place you wash up on God’s earth. Yes, thinks Bernadette, and that’s why I like it. Because in the market everything is lately come. Everything is foreign, and so nothing is foreign. No one is out of place here. They come up weary from the docks, and when they see this place, they know they’re nearing home again.

  East of the pepper stall the wastes are parked up with cars. A man stands on the roof of one, shouting at the passing trade. He doesn’t have a coster’s voice but he’s building up a crowd. He has papers in his hand. He shakes them as he shouts and they flicker in the sun.

  ‘Excuse me; what is it he’s selling?’ Bernadette asks the man beside her, but he runs his tongue under his lips, as if he means to hawk.

  ‘Foreign muck,’ he says, under cover of his moustache, and then suddenly raises his voice to roar at the man on the car, ‘You ought to be locked up!’

  The man on the car turns to them. He’s in shirtsleeves but the car is hot: the sweat is running down his cheeks. His eyes search for his adversary and find only Bernadette.

  ‘You say so, do you? Then name my crime. Name the punishment for free speech in a free country. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned, freely. I’ve read the writings of great men, and I say it’s the high hats need the locking up! If someone wants blaming it’s them! I say we’ve had enough, you and I, of unearned privilege. Yes, and empty promises –’

  She has her hand to her chest. She can feel her heart’s quick-time, but as she moves away a woman catches her eye and Bernadette finds herself sharing a smile.

  ‘What a lot of noise!’ the woman says, and Bernadette says yes, it is, and she stops with the woman and her friends, safe at the back of the crowd, more grateful than she can say for the small spark of empathy.

  She waits there, catching her breath. She can hear the costers behind her and the women and men all around her, a dizzying whirl of voices, and the man on the car still raging above them.

  ‘Is this what we fought for and won? Is this – this waste – is this what was promised us? Fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, have we not all done our duty? Have we not done all, all and more, than was ever asked of us? So now where is our reward?’

  ‘– PARSNIPS, lily-white PARSNIPS, sweet ONIONS and pearly BARLEY, they’ll make you a broth that’s better than BRANDY –’

  ‘I’m not a fiddler, am I now? No one can call me that. No, I put myself about. I’m not a grafter, fair enough, but no one can call me idle –’

  ‘– I told him, I’m right browned off. Alright, he says, I’ll take you out. We’ll go up west and live it up.’

  ‘– I’m too expensive for wages, is all.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Didn’t he just! He wasn’t getting out of that!’

  I want to go, Bernadette thinks. I want to be home. But home is here, now, isn’t it? Isn’t it fair old London Town?

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Home is my children.’

  ‘Are you alright, dear?’ someone says, and she nods and flaps her hand.

  ‘It’s passing,’ she says. ‘It’ll pass.’

  She peers homewards, through the crowd . . . and there is Mary Lockhart, Mary from the Columbia Buildings, at a stall of chinaware. And Mary has seen Bernadette, is looking back at her; is looking through her and away.

  Bernadette blushes in the sun. She has too few friendly neighbours – Dora, upstairs: that makes one. Another friendly face or two would make the rest easier to bear. The coldness of these people! Look at this woman now. Beforetimes, Bernadette has caught the way Mary watches her boy. All she does is watch, as if Jem might steal something; as if he might be stealing just by breathing London air. Bernadette has heard the edge in Mary’s voice when her girls play out with Jem. The worry when she calls them in. And her fellow is worse, with his limp and his stare and the chip on his shoulder. Mary’s fellow is trouble. There’s violence in the man, just waiting to get out.

  As if their girls are anything, thinks Bernadette (the coldness reaching her own heart). Them with their pokey faces.

  When she looks again – ready to scowl – Mary is already gone.

  ‘What did you wear, then?’ says the woman who showed her a kindness, but she isn’t speaking to Bernadette, of course; only to her friend.

  ‘My New Look,’ says the friend. ‘We took the bus to Selfridges. Then it was tea at Lyons and then the Marble Arch Pavilion. I drew some looks, I can tell you. The old man didn’t half have a fit!’

  Bernadette draws her summer coat around her. She raises her chin and starts for home. She has forgotten the book that Mr Nothing keeps for her. The man on the car is still shouting behind her.

  *

  Dora is scrumping elderflower, basket on one freckled arm. Or is scrumping only for apples? Perhaps it’s a harvesting; but no, harvesting is things like corn. She has an irritating feeling that elder might just be a picking.

  I don’t care, she thinks. I am scrumping my elderflower.

  Her English is getting better. She remembers how shameful it was when she and Solly first arrived. It made her feel such a fool. And it made the people seem dull, when all they spoke was gibberish. The first thing she decided, then, was that people talk too much to say even the smallest thing. But then her English improved and she had to admit to Solly that she’d been wrong. It was just that things sounded smaller, in gibberish.

  Her basket is full of elder – creamy plates of flowers, laid down in springy layers – but they weigh next to nothing and Dora can squeeze in more. On her way she found nasturtiums and sorrel, but she’ll pick them going home, for freshness. Jones’s milkers only graze the plot he’s fenced, and Dora has never met anyone else foraging in summer. The English are foolish that way. They’d rather go without than eat any wild thing, except the nuts and berries that any child knows.

  She’s saving the best tree till last – an old one, with one split trunk, that must have stood in a garden long before the houses fell around it – but she hasn’t got that far. Dora is still close to home, where the waste isn’t so wild and the elders are still young.

  She’d better hurry, she thinks. She’s been having such a good time that the sun is already past noon. She’ll have to put some vim into it if she means to finish before dinner.

  There is a sound
and she looks up. A small boy is walking by, from the south side fence into the ruins. His cheeks are tanned with dirt. He’s dressed as if for winter: sweater – shirttails poking out – and a duffle-coat, all mucky and too small for him.

  ‘Good morning!’ Dora calls (but the morning has gone, hasn’t it? Oh well), and the boy slows and peers at her.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. He stands on one foot, scratches an ankle, then walks on into the ruins, upright as a City gent. All he needs are a brolly and bowler.

  How funny, Dora thinks; but then it isn’t, really. It’s nothing to smile about, a little boy so poor and dirty.

  She goes back to work on the elder. It’s best picked on sunny days, but there have been few this year, and Dora has left it late. Some of the flower heads are thin, the green showing through, and the rest are full of bugs, but Dora doesn’t mind them; they don’t mean her any harm. Each time she cuts a head, she shakes the creatures free – gently, so as to keep the pollen – then bows to smell the flowers.

  Now she has stripped the young trees bare. She starts towards her best elder. She is wading through weeds and buttercups (cups but no butter, she thinks) when someone whistles, far off, and she turns and sees Solly and Clarence, high above her in the distance. Solly waves, and she waves back.

  The waste basks in the heat. Long Debris, the children call it, and it does run for a good way, winding between houses and yards, but the bombing here was meant for the docks, and there’s no pattern to it. Only where the rocket struck is the waste much wider than a handful of tenements. Elsewhere, here and there, buildings still stand in the jungle. Dora stays away from them. Sometimes there are people in them, beggars or tinkers or lovers, and they shouldn’t frighten her – they mean no harm, either – but still, they make her wary. Besides, the buildings are all condemned: most are burned out or have fallen in, or are no more than right-angles or single monolithic walls, leaning or bulging, their bricks topped with buddleia.