Half a Crown

by Jo Walton

  At the bottom of the trunk I found a pair of gym slippers that still fit, only because the leather was so soft, old bronze ones with rosettes on the toes.

  It wasn’t until I noticed my empty Ovaltine cup on the bedside table that I remembered what I’d overheard on my way to the kitchen. “It’s my ward. She doesn’t know anything. If she comes in, don’t say anything.” I hadn’t thought anything of it. He was the head of the Watch, after all. But a few moments later, after she’d muttered something, I heard him say, “I can put you on our payroll as an informer. You did just give me some very good information, and I can also explain your visit that way. What you do with the money, putting it towards paying forgers or buying ships to export Jews, is your business. Our budget for information is high.”

  In the morning sunlight, as I brushed my hair with my old school hairbrush, it seemed like a dream. How could Uncle Carmichael be involved with anything clandestine? He was the head of the Watch! And if he were, how could I inform on him as I had been taught I should inform? Who could I tell who wouldn’t immediately report it to him? And besides, I owed everything to him; without him I’d have nothing, no hope of paying my fees at Oxford, no money to pay Mrs. Maynard for my board. I’d have to go back to the gutter, and there was nothing there for me either. In any case, the very concept was ridiculous. I trusted him, had trusted him for years. The very idea of my turning him in was ludicrous, immoral even, no matter how much we were all exhorted to be alert. Even if he were involved in something wrong, I couldn’t possibly do my duty and turn him in. But he couldn’t have been doing anything wrong. Yet I remembered him threatening the redheaded policeman the day before, and shivered. He had been so different. Still, I must have misheard, or misunderstood. Though spending Watch money to pay forgers or export Jews was unarguable—unless he was leading her on in some way, playing her along so that he could find out more. Yes, that must be it. Relieved, I pulled the wooden brush quickly through the night’s tangles in my hair and caught it back in a simple ponytail.

  My makeup was in my bag and my bag was still missing, so I couldn’t put my face on. I went out in search of breakfast bare-faced like a little girl. To my surprise, Uncle Carmichael was sitting in his usual armchair. “Good morning,” I said. “I thought you’d be in work by this time.”

  “Today’s the day we had the date to go down to Kent to see the primroses and your great-aunt Katherine. I’d booked the day off. I’ve telephoned the Watchtower and checked that there are no urgent fires that need attending to, and I thought we might as well do as we’d planned.”

  “What a splendid idea,” I said. I had almost forgotten about our plan, although we did it every year. The last few years I’d been bored by it, but today, with the sun shining, and after the events of the last few days, I was only too happy at the thought of going out into the countryside and breathing some really fresh air. “The only problem is that I have nothing to wear.”

  “Eh? What you’re wearing looks fine to me,” Uncle Carmichael said. He was a typical old bachelor, he never took the faintest notice of clothes. “And don’t you have a trunkful of fripperies in your room here?”

  “I have grown four inches taller since I left them here, and two inches broader across the chest,” I said, baldly. “Worst of all, I have no proper shoes.”

  He had the good grace to look embarrassed. “Well, what you’re wearing will do. The shoes look fine. It’s not as if you’re going to be presented this afternoon. Sit down and have some breakfast and then we’ll get off.”

  With that, Jack emerged from the kitchen with a toast rack and two boiled eggs in eggcups. There was butter on the table already, and the Japanese teapot sat beside Uncle Carmichael. “Will you want more than this, Elvira?” Jack asked, smiling at me. “Bacon? Kippers? Porridge?”

  “I’d love a kipper. Mrs. Maynard won’t have them in the house. And in Paris, you wouldn’t believe, it was worse than Switzerland— nothing for breakfast but a croissant and a little dab of jam. They were scrummy croissants, admittedly, and good jam too, but that’s not enough for a growing girl.”

  “Not enough for one who has grown four inches in the last two years,” Uncle Carmichael put in. “Maybe you should keep off the kippers and stick to croissants in future.”

  We ate our breakfasts, bickering amicably, and finished off with more toast and marmalade. He was Uncle Carmichael; it was so unthinkable that he could possibly be any sort of traitor that I almost forgot about it, but it kept creeping back into my mind in the oddest way.

  It wasn’t until we were putting on our coats to go that I remembered Aunt Katherine’s present. “We have to call in at Mrs. Maynard’s first,” I said.

  “You look fine as you are,” Uncle Carmichael said, impatiently. Jack had found time somehow to brush and sponge my coat and get the worst of the muck off it. It wasn’t a disgrace anymore, it just looked like a much older coat than it was, and one that had been worn in the country.

  “No, it’s not that, though these shoes really won’t do. I have a present for Aunt Katherine. I brought it from Switzerland.”

  “What is it?” Uncle Carmichael asked.

  “You’ll think it’s terribly silly, but it’s a cuckoo clock. It’s just the sort of thing she’d love and think was really special.”

  Uncle Carmichael sighed. “If we call at the Maynards’, you’ll disappear off with Betsy and I’ll have to give Mrs. Maynard a piece of my mind for the way she abandoned you, and half the day will be gone before we’re out of London. Why don’t you tell your aunt Katherine about it today and send it on to her by post?”

  “Look at these slippers,” I said, thrusting my foot out.

  He peered at them doubtfully, then sighed. “We’ll have to be very quick.”

  The car was waiting, a staid old black police Bentley. It always was, and I’d have been surprised to see anything different. This was just like the car in which Uncle Carmichael and my father had driven into Hampshire, on which drive my father had confessed to liking primroses and having an aunt who lived in Kent. I don’t know why this had become so significant to Uncle Carmichael, because I could think of lots of things Dad liked more, such as a good pint of bitter, or a plate of steak and chips, or a sing-along at the panto. Uncle Carmichael always drove himself, and I sat in the front seat. When I was nine and we did this for the first time, I was quite excited about that. I remembered how my feet hadn’t reached the floor. Now, I had to put the seat back a little to make room for my legs.

  We wove our way through the London traffic to the Maynards’ house, Uncle Carmichael muttering about wasting time and routes to Maidstone all the way. The funny thing was that I knew once we were out of London he’d cheer up, even though he always said he liked the north best.

  “Do you want to move back to the Maynards’?” he asked, turning down Park Lane behind a big red bus. “You can stay at the flat if you prefer.”

  “Mrs. Maynard is supposed to present me next Tuesday evening,” I said, remembering guiltily that I’d missed a fitting for my Court dress. “If I’m doing the whole deb thing and coming out, I have to stay with her. Besides, Betsy needs me.”

  A taxi cut in front of us; Uncle Carmichael braked hard. “I hate this London traffic,” he muttered. “What do you want, Elvira? Do you want to be a deb?”

  “Well, it’s what girls do, isn’t it? And I’m so close now, it would seem silly to stop at this point.” I had already said that Betsy needed me, so I didn’t say it again, but that’s what was in my mind. She had looked so desperate. “What’s really important to me, what I’m really looking forward to, is Oxford, but that doesn’t start until October. I may as well do this properly over the summer first.”

  “All right then,” he said, pulling up in front of the Maynards’ house. I jumped out and ran up the stairs to ring the bell. Goldfarb came and opened it, of course. “Miss Elvira,” he said, unbending a little from his usual hyper-correct butler manner to smile. He remembered me as a child
, of course. “I’m glad to see you’re well.”

  “I’m very well,” I said. “I’m going to run up to my room to get some things, and then look in on Miss Betsy if she’s awake. Is Mrs. Maynard receiving? Because if she is, my uncle would like a word with her.”

  By this time, Uncle Carmichael had locked the car and was standing beside me. Goldfarb nodded to him. “Your card, sir?”

  Uncle Carmichael handed Goldfarb a card, and I slipped in and ran upstairs to my room and shut the door. Olive or one of the other maids had hung up the clothes Betsy and I had left draped on the bed. I flung off everything, dropping it in neglectful heaps, and opened the wardrobe. Tweeds would be ideal for a day in the country, and fortunately I had another good set. The heathery ones had come from Edinburgh, and the mossy ones from Perth, but I’d bought them both in London. I looked at them, then thrust them back into the wardrobe. The sun was shining and I wasn’t going to that kind of country. I took out a very simple dress I’d had made in Geneva the summer before, one of the few things Betsy and I didn’t have to match. It was cream cotton, sprigged all over in a tiny pattern with little blue flowers. I’d fallen in love with the material and had the dress made up. It wasn’t quite as long or as full as it should have been, for this year, but neither Uncle Carmichael nor Aunt Katherine were likely to notice. It felt cool and fresh and I put a blue ribbon on my boater and stuck that on top of my head.

  I pulled on nylons and glanced at myself in the wardrobe mirror. I put my face on quickly; powder, eyes, just a dab of blusher. My favorite lipstick had been in my bag, so I had to use a redder one, but it looked all right. I took the cuckoo clock box out of the wardrobe. Then I couldn’t put it off any longer and went down the corridor to Betsy’s room.

  I didn’t knock, in case she was asleep, just opened the door and peered around it like a housemaid. Her arm was in plaster from shoulder to fingertips, and fixed in a kind of sling thing to support it. She wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t doing anything either, just staring straight ahead at the pink cabbages on the wallpaper, or maybe at our formal Invitations to the Presentation that were propped on her mantelpiece. She looked over at the door when I slipped in, and her face just crumpled up with relief. “I’m all right, Bets,” I said, slipping in and closing the door. “But how about you? You look as if you’ve been in the wars.”

  “Both the bones in the lower part of my arm are broken. The doctor said they made an S shape on the x-ray. They had to operate to get them back where they’re supposed to go. This huge plaster is to keep everything in position.” She looked dubiously at it. “It has to stay on for two weeks, then there’ll be a lighter plaster probably for another month or six weeks, they say.”

  “You poor old thing.” I kissed her cheek. “Does it hurt much?” “Right after it happened it hurt like billy-o, and when I was in the hospital having it messed with, x-rayed and things, before they knocked me out to operate. But now it just aches, and kind of itches in a funny way. They’ve given me tablets, and stuff to make me sleep in this funny position, and that helps. But it’s not so bad.”

  I perched on the chair at the side of the bed. “How did it happen?”

  “Oh, I slipped and put it out to save myself and it just snapped. Sir Alan was very good, he got me to the car and to hospital. Then he phoned Mummy. But what about you? We thought you’d come home in a taxi. We had no idea you were missing practically until we got back.”

  I took a deep breath and gave her the summary. “I got swept up with rioters and they put me in a cell. It was pretty grim, but Uncle Carmichael got me out all right. The problem is, and I’m terribly sorry, but they took my bag, and your pearls are in it. I don’t expect your mother is going to come in and check your jewelry box, but try to think of something if she does before I get them back.”

  “The pearls don’t matter. Mummy won’t check, and if she does I can say I was wearing them and they broke,” Betsy said, airily.

  “Uncle Carmichael says he can get the bag back, so don’t say anything that would mean they were really lost. But I don’t know how long it’ll take.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ll say they slipped down the side of the sofa. More important is, we missed our fittings.”

  “Are we still going to be presented, with your arm like that?” I asked. “Couldn’t we put it off until one of the later Courts? They go on until June, after all.”

  “Mummy said it would be hard to rearrange this late in the day, and that it isn’t discreditable to have an accident and besides the sling might get me some sympathy attention.” Betsy looked pale and miserable. “I begged her to put it off, actually, but she wouldn’t have it. She thinks it isn’t as important now to make a good impression. She seems to think Sir Alan will be bound to marry me now he’s let me get my arm broken—and he really was very good and attentive during all the fuss.”

  “But you don’t like him any better?” I asked.

  “I do, actually, though not at all in a marrying way. He seemed much more human, fussing with doctors and trying to get hold of Mummy and all of that. He was really concerned about the x-ray. He didn’t leave until after I’d come round from the anesthetic. I still don’t find him the slightest bit attractive, that beard, ugh, but he made a marvelous buffer with Mummy during all the hospital stuff.” She sighed. “It would be a terrible reason to marry someone, wouldn’t it, because I liked them better than Mummy?”

  “Do you think he likes you?”

  “I don’t think he has the slightest idea who I am,” Betsy said, and bit her lip the way she does when she’s afraid she might cry.

  “Look, I have to go,” I said. “Uncle Carmichael’s downstairs talking to your mother. He’s taking me to Kent to see primroses and give the clock to my aunt. I’ll be back tonight, and we can have a proper chin-wag then.”

  She smiled a little at the old-fashioned word. “I’m so glad you’re coming back. I was afraid your uncle would say we hadn’t taken proper care of you.”

  “He did say that, but I said I wanted to come back anyway,” I said. “Don’t worry, Elizabeth, it’ll all come out all right. Just don’t let your mother know about the pearls.”

  “Never mind piglets, she’d have a whole pig,” Betsy said. “But she won’t know. Have you got the cuckoo clock there?”

  “Over by the door. Even though it’s silly, she’ll love it. It’s just the sort of thing that would appeal to her.”

  Betsy smiled, and I picked the clock up. “See you later,” she said.

  I wanted to reassure her again that everything would be all right, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to it, so I just smiled and said good-bye and went off to find Uncle Carmichael.

  10

  As the car swept along the raised autobahn past Maidstone there was a moment when all Kent spread out before them like a banquet. Carmichael always looked out for that first glimpse, when the patchwork of fields, the hedges, the round stone towers of the oast-houses, and the incredible green of the English countryside in spring came together to make a vista. He remembered the first time he saw it like that, the year the autobahn was finished. Elvira had been twelve, and she’d said if it had been an ordinary sort of road they’d have put up signs and a stopping place for people to take photographs and a little stall selling whelks and ice cream. The autobahn permitted no such lingering; it forced you on at speed in a straight line from London to Folkestone and Dover, where boats left regularly for the Continent. They were talking about building a tunnel from Folkestone to Dieppe, but Carmichael didn’t think anything would come of it. Besides, when he thought about his own escape from Dunkirk, it struck him as like digging a tunnel under the moat. Britain might be best friends with the Continent these days, but plenty of people hadn’t forgotten 1940, or 1914, or 1810 for that matter.

  They needed to leave the elevated road at the next exit, and Carmichael signaled to change lanes. “I’ll be glad to be in the country rather than just looking down at it,” Elvir
a said. “I saw it from on top when we came back from Paris last week. The oasthouses look like toys from the observation deck.”

  “I’ll be relieved to drive a little slower,” Carmichael admitted. He didn’t often drive himself, and had found both the London traffic and the high speeds of the autobahn trying. “They didn’t even have this kind of road when I learned to drive.”

  Elvira laughed. “You talk as if you’re a hundred years old, Uncle Carmichael, and you’re not even forty.”

  “How do you know how old I am?”

  “I asked Jack.” She giggled. “Servants always know everything.”

  Carmichael couldn’t smile. Keeping his love for Jack hidden from Elvira had been a constant heartache since he took over responsibility for her. He dreaded her finding out and her affection for him turning to disgust.

  They turned off the old Maidstone road down a country lane, between hedgerows of hazel and hawthorn. “Might be some primroses soon,” Carmichael said. He stole a glance at Elvira. She was eighteen; not a child any longer but nor was she quite grown up. She looked summery and fresh in her pretty straw hat. She had come to mean a lot to him, the child he would never have, the last of Royston, and her own self, so clever, so pretty, so brave—and so young and innocent. It tugged at his heart that she had needed pearls and he had not provided them, and it distressed him past endurance that she had been thrown into a cell with Ironsides and could have ended up in a slave camp in Germany. He had established the Inner Watch out of his belief that it shouldn’t happen to any innocent, but ten times, a hundred times more it shouldn’t happen to Elvira. Elvira should have sunlight and pearls and primroses and a presentation to the Queen, and he would do everything in his power to see that she had them.