by Ros Franey
‘Only just now,’ I said, not wanting her to think I’d been spying. ‘I like that piece.’
‘Well it won’t be ready for tomorrow. There are tricky bits.’ She sounded annoyed.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I can’t play it.’
‘Well, you will in good time,’ she promised me. She had stopped playing and was looking at me with slight impatience, as if waiting for me either to ask a question or go away.
‘Please play some more,’ I begged her. My thought was that Miss Higgs would notice she had stopped and would hear us talking.
She pulled a face, her lips set tight. Then she seemed to relent, patting the bench on which she sat. ‘Come and play with me. You can pull out the stops when I tell you.’
I hopped up beside her and she went back to practising, while I experimented with ‘tuba’ and ‘flute’.
Glancing down at the pedals I saw she was wearing her old button boots: ‘You’re not wearing your lovely shoes, even though it’s Saturday!’ I had said it before I realised.
She was silent, her face set hard as she played. Then she said flatly, ‘I don’t wear those any more.’
‘Oh’, I breathed. This was sad news. ‘Why not?’
‘I just don’t.’ She spoke it quite harshly, and in a manner so abrupt that I realised she was definitely not happy with me and I wondered what I’d done wrong. For a moment I wanted to burst into tears – I had always felt we had a special bond with her beloved father and my mother dying when we were small – but just as unexpectedly, she seemed to realise she was being unfriendly and said, ‘Actually, I gave them to my sister. Pull out the trumpet stop, will you, Annie? We’ll try the ending loud.’
I searched for the trumpet stop, my mind aflutter. I had not considered that there could be more than one wearer of the blue shoes. I tried to imagine Beatrice ever giving me a pair of her shoes: no chance! ‘But surely,’ I faltered, ‘they can only be worn by you!’
‘Me and half the City!’ she said bitterly. ‘They were in Timpson’s sale!’ The trumpet stop blared out the final chords of Sheep May Safely Graze. Clearly I would need to revise my whole notion of Miss Mildred Blessing; it suddenly seemed far less likely that it had been her dancing in our garden that night. Why, it could have been half the City! Disappointment flooded through me. I slithered off the harmonium stool. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I told her. ‘And anyway you shouldn’t use the trumpet stop: it’s meant to be ppp at the end.’
She must have caught the dismay in my voice, because she turned to me in surprise. ‘Oh Annie, what’s the matter? It was just our joke. Just a bit of fun. Don’t rush off; we’ll play it properly now.’
‘Mother’s waiting,’ I said. ‘I’ll get into trouble. Goodbye, Miss Blessing.’ I needed to be away from her with her changeable moods. I needed to think. I could sense the regret in her eyes as I scuttled irreverently in front of the altar, the quickest way to the door.
As I passed the vestry, which was off to the side beyond the pulpit, I could hear a murmur of voices from behind the dark green vestry curtain. It was Mother, and she must have still been talking to the Verger, which was a relief; maybe she hadn’t heard Miss Blessing on the trumpet stop or realised I’d disobeyed her. I was about to creep out to the chapel porch when something in their conversation stopped me. It was a note of doom in the Verger’s voice. I couldn’t help it, I stood and listened: ‘And now another young girl … Police on the doorstep … disappeared.’
Miss Higgs, somewhat louder, responded, ‘Well, Mr Wilkinson, I trust that…’ Her voice dropped and I couldn’t hear the next bit. ‘… That’s where they are: believe me, I know.’
The Verger murmured something in an undertone; I caught the words, ‘three of them …’ Then Miss Higgs said briskly, ‘And now, Mr Wilkinson, I can’t stay here tittle-tattling—’
I didn’t wait to hear more. With a sympathetic thought for the poor Verger, put firmly in his place, I shot through the door, leaned against it so it would close softly once more and sat down on the pew where Miss Higgs had left me, trying to take deep breaths in the hope she would think I’d been there all along. Could Mother really know where the missing girls were? I didn’t have time to consider this fully before she came bustling along to find me.
‘Mother,’ I ventured as we turned down St Ann’s Well Road towards the centre, ‘is it time for me to have a new pair of shoes, do you think, for the Winter?’
She looked at me critically. ‘What for?’ she asked.
‘Well, you know, my feet are growing.’ I held one up for inspection, hoping the boot on it would look suitably tight.
‘I’ll be the judge of that. Walk properly, girl.’
Somehow I had to get to the window of Timpson’s and see if the blue shoes were still in the sale. ‘Sort of pinches,’ I said. ‘I think they’re getting a bit small.’
‘Don’t moan, Annie. If they are, Beatrice has grown out of her size threes, which are perfectly good.’
‘I’m not ready for a three, Mother. These are twelves. I’m still on children’s sizes.’ I could hear myself sounding petulant, which was really all to do with feeling upset about Miss Blessing being so peculiar.
Mother said nothing. We walked in silence for a few moments. ‘We could go and look at my feet in Timpson’s new Pedoscope! Marjorie Bagshaw had it done,’ I suggested – immediately regretting it, because Marjorie Bagshaw must for ever now be associated in Mother’s mind with that night after Goose Fair. Besides, I no longer had the stomach for this fight, and she could tell.
‘I’m the one who decides what we’re doing, Annie, not you – and we are not buying boots. We’re buying vests. Good gracious, I hope you girls aren’t going to grow up with huge ugly feet!’
That stung, of course. She certainly knew how to get at a person. Auntie Vera always said graceful young ladies had small feet, and I fervently hoped that mine would stop growing. For the rest of the afternoon, as we crossed the city centre to and from Jessops in King Street, I forgot about the shoes and kept my eyes peeled for newspaper hoardings that might throw light on my newest piece of knowledge from the outside world: the mystery of the three missing girls and I know where they are. But it was Saturday afternoon and there was nothing on the billboards except ‘Forest Final’, which is all about football and not in the slightest interesting.
‘Beatrice,’ I asked that night when we were marking the readings in our Bibles for tomorrow’s service, a weekly ritual introduced by Mother to stop us riffling through the pages and making a disturbance during the lesson, ‘do you know anything about young girls disappearing?’
‘Oh no,’ said Beatrice, who wasn’t paying attention, ‘it’s not the Parable of the Talents again! I’m sorry, but I have great difficulty with Jesus about this. For unto everyone that hath shall it be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. And then the people with nothing go and get thrown into everlasting fire. How can it be fair, Annie?’
I shrugged. I didn’t know why things like this bothered her so much. God was unfair and I didn’t understand why Bea couldn’t see that. But I didn’t say it, because I loved her. I just looked at her with pity and waited for an answer to my question.
She put the marker in Matthew 25 and snapped her Bible shut. ‘Sorry. What did you ask me?’
I told her about the conversation I’d overheard at the Mission.
‘You shouldn’t have been earwigging,’ said Beatrice, unhelpfully.
‘It’s not my fault I was there. Anyway, it’s in the papers.’
‘I don’t know,’ she concluded.
‘Haven’t you heard about it? There are three missing girls, and Mother told Mr Wilkinson she knows where they are. D’you think she’s going to tell the police?’
‘Search me,’ said Beatrice. Honestly, what’s the point of an older sister who’s so busy worrying about the Parable of the Talents that she doesn’t listen to ordinary decent gossip?
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Then I remembered something else I needed to know. ‘Beatrice?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it, Annie!’
‘It’s not about that,’ I said quickly. ‘Are your feet still growing?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied absently. ‘Probably.’
‘I thought I needed new shoes and Mother said we might end up with clodhoppers. I don’t want big feet, Bea.’
‘Mmm.’
Then a thought came to me. ‘In China it wouldn’t matter if your feet grew big, would it, because you’d bind them anyway.’ Perhaps this was the solution: I could maybe bind my feet if they got too big. I thought about it for a few moments. ‘Beatrice, if you were Auntie Francie bicycling around China unbinding the women’s feet, d’you think they’d want you to? Maybe they’d rather have little feet?’
Beatrice looked up. I knew I was annoying her, but serve her right for not knowing about the missing girls. She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘They’d probably be glad. In the end. Maybe not straight away.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it would hurt, wouldn’t it? If your toes have been bent up underneath you since you were a little girl?’
I stared at her in alarm. ‘Is that what they do? What do they do?’
‘They …’ Beatrice hesitated. ‘I don’t really know,’ she said.
‘Do they break little girls’ toes, Bea? Do they?’ I realised I was whispering; it was too horrible a thing to say out loud.
Beatrice looked stricken. ‘I – I’m not sure,’ she said.
‘Why do they do that?’
Beatrice shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose if your feet are bound you can’t walk very far. You can’t dance, or anything.’
‘You can’t run away, you mean?’
‘I suppose. Yes.’
‘How awful.’ I had a sudden vision of the little girls of China queuing up in their clean white cotton socks and a man coming down the line with a hammer … I shuddered. ‘Then what does Auntie Francie do?’
‘I dunno, Annie. Unbinds them, I suppose. I’m sure she’s very gentle.’
‘So are they all right after that? Once it stops hurting?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Beatrice miserably. ‘I expect so.’ But she didn’t sound very sure.
We hunted through out Bibles a bit more, in silence. Then I asked, ‘So will you do that, Bea, when you’re a missionary? Go round on your bicycle and unbind the little girls’ feet?’
Beatrice looked at me for a moment, then she said kindly, ‘It doesn’t happen here, Annie, does it? So you haven’t to worry about it any more.’
I curled my own toes inside my black lisle stockings. I said nothing.
I remained in the dark about the disappeared girls for almost a week. Then it suddenly came up in domestic science, of all places. We were making pastry for our jam tarts. As usual, mine was stuck to my fingers.
‘You know what, Miss, they found those girls, Miss!’ said Edith Jelley.
‘They never,’ corrected Marjorie. ‘They only found the place they’d been kept.’
‘They found the cellar,’ Edith admitted. ‘But the girls must be round there somewhere.’
I was all ears, but Miss Pollard, the domestic science teacher, was having none of it. ‘Edith, you want to concentrate more on the pastry and less on the gossip,’ she remarked. ‘What are you going to do with that, girl? Plaster the kitchen?’
Everyone giggled.
‘Lightly,’ Miss Pollard went on. ‘Use the tips of your fingers lightly, like playing the piano, Grace Wiggins, not like kneading clay.’
‘Is mine all right, Miss?’ Marjorie asked, pausing in mid-air with her elbows sticking out.
‘Just keep at it, Marjorie. And I do have a name you know.’
‘We’ve been doing it for ages, Miss,’ Edith moaned.
‘We’ve been doing it for ages, Miss Pollard,’ Miss P. corrected her. ‘And you can do it for a while longer. Annie, more flour.’
Later, when Miss Pollard left the room for a moment, the tarts in the big hissing ovens and the domestic science room starting to smell all fragrant, I whispered to Marjorie, ‘What cellar?’
‘Cellar in Beeston. Imagine! They found traces.’
‘Traces of what?’ I asked.
‘Of them, of the girls that disappeared.’
‘How did they know it was them?’
‘Search me.’
‘What sort of traces?’ asked Grace Wiggins, who was leaning against the sink.
‘Body parts!’ said Edith, and snorted, trying not to laugh.
‘Don’t be daft! I dunno, maybe bits of clothing or summat. A teddy bear.’
I thought of Little Sid and let out a small cry.
Marjorie turned on me. ‘I don’t know, do I, stupid?’
‘How many girls?’ asked Doreen Noakes.
‘Loads, I should imagine. At least five!’
‘Three!’ chorused Edith and Marjorie, and glared at each other.
‘How did the police know they’d all been down there?’ Grace wondered.
Edith shrugged. ‘Guesswork, I suppose. Fingerprints, maybe?’
I suddenly had an image of my own fingers, slightly greasy and with that smell on them from the coal dust, spread out over the basin of water the morning after my night in the cellar.
‘Whose house was it? Where are the girls now?’
Nobody knew.
‘Beeston?’ I repeated.
‘Aye, “The Black Hole of Beeston”, so it said in the Evening Post.’ We all looked at each other uneasily, not quite knowing whether to find it funny or not. Then the tarts were cooked and Miss Pollard bustled back into the room and I think we were all very pleased to forget about it. But walking home from school through the Oaks, I went over the conversation again and filed it away. A cellar in Beeston. Miss Higgs said she knew where they were. She also knew about cellars. And Beeston was where she’d lived with her sister.
It was a few nights after this that my Nana routine went wrong. Had we become careless? I have wondered about this, but I don’t think so. Whatever the reason, I had just returned from collecting her and was dropping off to sleep with the rain whipping against the windows when I suddenly started wide awake. Beyond the sound of the rain came another; the unmistakable tread of Mother in her hard slippers along the landing. Perhaps she suspected; perhaps she did not and was just on the prowl as she had been before. But in a flash, and thankful I had decided it was too dangerous to make Nana a proper bed on the hearthrug, I lifted the heavy counterpane that hung around my own bed and Nana, instantly knowing what was expected of her, shot underneath with a speed I would not have thought possible in one so large. A second later, the door opened and Mother entered.
‘Annie?’
I pretended to be just waking up. ‘Mother?’ I asked sleepily.
She snapped on the light and her eyes darted round the room, taking everything in. ‘Did I hear a noise coming from this room?’
I looked at her blearily. ‘Noise? No … I don’t know.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I didn’t hear anything.’ A gust of wind blew a shower against the glass. ‘The rain—?’ I suggested, blinking at her.
She advanced on the bed ominously. ‘Have you been up to something?’
‘No–oo,’ I groaned. ‘I was asleep.’
With one practised flick of the wrist she wrenched the bedclothes back. I lay there with Little Sid tucked in beside me, shivering in my white flannel nightie. From Nana there was no sound, or perhaps her breathing was drowned by the wind and rain, for after a moment Mother, who seemed unsure what to do next, leaned down and grasped my toes. ‘Your feet are cold. Have you been out of bed?’
‘No, Mother. I am cold. It’s cold.’ I wanted to tell her to give me back the bedclothes and get out and let me go to sleep, but I knew this would be fatal, so I bit my tongue and waited.
‘Don’t moan, child. You should be
wearing bedsocks,’ she said after a moment. Then without pulling up the bedclothes she turned and left the room, switching off the light, without a word.
‘Good night, Mother,’ I said softly to the closed door. ‘Sleep well, Mother. Sweet Dreams.’ Then I rearranged the messy bed and snuggled down. Lifting the counterpane again, I felt beneath for Nana. I heard her tail beat just twice on the lino. She gave my fingers a small lick, but stayed exactly where she was. I lay wide awake, my heart hammering against my ribs. On the following night, Nana hung back and I had to pull at her collar to get her through the kitchen door. She took it upon herself to sleep under the bed every night after that, and I’m glad to say nothing else went wrong for ages.
Then one Monday, when I came home from school, Beatrice – who had stayed away that day with a poorly chest – came into my room and sat down carefully on the bed. I looked at her. I could tell she had news.
‘Good day at school?’ she asked, delicately disentangling one of Nana’s hairs from the counterpane.
‘S’all right,’ I said. I watched her intently. ‘Did Doctor Martin come?’ As I’ve said before, poorly chests were to be taken seriously, what with shadows on the lung and worse.
But Beatrice shook her head impatiently. ‘Oh it’s nothing. He says it’s not congested. I’ve just got to stay off this week and do the Friar’s Balsam.’
‘So what, then?’
‘Well, I—’ She was picking at the counterpane again. She didn’t seem to know how to start.
‘What’s up, Bea? Look at me!’
She sighed. ‘I don’t want to alarm you …’ Her voice tailed off.
‘You don’t want to—? You are alarming me! What is it, Beatrice? What’s happened?’
‘Trouble is,’ she grumbled, ‘you’ll get the histrionics and it won’t help.’ She looked up at me for the first time. ‘Will you promise to be sensible about this, Annie?’