Jubilee (Book 1 of The Poppy Chronicles)

by Claire Rayner

  ‘It’s easier to deal with West End managements when you got a West End name,’ Ruby said. ‘So, you want me to find her? Listen, Kid, I ain’t a street arab no more. The old days, when I executed commissions for you – that was a long time ago.’

  ‘If it’s too much trouble,’ Lizah said tartly, ‘forget it!’ And got to his feet. He wanted to find Millie badly. He’d spent several days making the same enquiries Jessie had and getting precisely the same answers and ending in the same blind alley. But he wasn’t going to let this jumped up little squirt make him grovel. Either he helped willingly or not at all.

  ‘But that don’t mean I can’t help,’ Ruby said soothingly. ‘For Gawd’s sake, Kid, get off your high horse and sit down. We’ll talk. Tell me what you know about what she was doing and all that, and I’ll get one of the boys I know to look into it. I may not go out myself on these things any more but that don’t mean I can’t get ’em done.’ He leaned forwards confidentially. ‘So tell me. What has she been up to these last few years? What do you know about her and her kid? Then we’ll see what we can do for you.’

  * * *

  Poppy had made her humbug last all morning and no one had noticed she was sucking it. That was a very considerable achievement because Miss Peach was the most gimlet-eyed of all the teachers and everyone said she’d notice if you were just sitting with a tiny violet cachou under your tongue. But Poppy had sucked a humbug right from its sharpest four-pointed hugeness down to a mere sliver of peppermint without once chewing it up and no one at all had noticed. The underside of her tongue was numb with it and she felt a little queasy at the thought of having to eat a luncheon after walking back to the house, but never mind. She had won today’s battle.

  That was the only way she could make the days go by. Each morning she would make herself a promise about what she would do today that she shouldn’t. Sometimes it was crossing the traffic-clotted Bayswater Road on her own on her way to school and then crossing back, without anyone trying to stop her or escort her. She could only do that on the days when it was Queenie, the under-housemaid, who was supposed to take her to school for she was a lazy girl at the best of times and also had an understanding with the milkman. So all she ever did was come to the corner of Leinster Terrace and watch Poppy as she went the rest of her way alone, so that she could stand and talk to her lover over his churns.

  Sometimes Poppy would promise herself that she would make all the teachers, one after the other, tell her she was a good girl – and sometimes she would do the opposite and set out to make them all tell her she was naughty. Whatever it was she had to have something to make the days pass, for they were really dreadfully dull otherwise. All that the other little girls did was whisper and giggle and cry because they found the reading hard and couldn’t do their sums. Poppy had no trouble with the reading for she had been reading harder books than the ones the school gave her for years and years and years – and as for the sums – they were so easy they were silly. So what else was there but her own private games?

  Private games were important at the house too. Poppy never talked of home; when she heard the word she thought of Mama’s warm kitchen in Leather Lane and would see herself standing there in the doorway looking in at its bright warmth and the pink china clock and the purple and blue vases full of paper spills and the dresser with its arrangement of blue and white china, and smelling the delicious cakes and pies as the fire crackled in the range and the kettle hissed a welcome.

  The house she lived in now wasn’t like that. It was big and cold and full of people who watched her and teased her and laughed at her and that made it hateful. The only good thing about it was that it also had a lot of secret places where a person could hide; the little cubbyhole under the stairs, and the place behind the wardrobe in her bedroom and the cupboards that lined the long passageway on the other side of the green baize door that led to the kitchen. In the last few months she had been very clever, finding ends of candles and vestas to hide in each of her special places, so that she could creep away and sit there and read and no one would know where she was or what she was doing.

  Not that anyone cared; she knew that. If anyone thought about where she was, they always thought she was with someone else. Mama would say vaguely, ‘Playing with the boys then, m’dear?’ when she appeared in the drawing room and the boys would look up and sneer if she came into the nursery or the schoolroom and think she’d been with her mother. So she had lots of time for reading – and happily, lots of books to read. That was another good thing about the house; there were books galore, in the room they called the study where no one ever went. Some of them were dull and some of them were stupid but they were all full of words, and that was what made them important. For Poppy words in a row were what made life in that horrid house possible.

  She had tried very hard at first to make Mama understand how much she hated the house. She had begged to go home to be just happy again and to return to Baldwin’s Gardens School with Miss Rushmore and the other girls and boys, but Mama had suddenly become dreadfully angry; so angry that she had frightened Poppy who had sat and stared at her as she talked and talked and talked.

  ‘We’re never going back there, never, never, never, do you understand me, Poppy? I never want to hear another word about – about where we used to live and what we used to do. It was a bad time and it must be forgotten. It was a bad school for there were boys there and boys are bad and –’

  ‘Why, Mama?’ Poppy had ventured, but Mama had just rushed on.

  ‘– they do bad things to little girls. You must never talk to boys except for those you know, here at home. Do you understand me, Poppy? Say yes, you do.’

  ‘Yes,’ Poppy said obediently, but she didn’t. The boys here at the house were horrible, much more horrible than she could ever have imagined. They pinched her and pulled her hair and laughed at her and made faces at her and took away any of her things that she did not hide and keep safe. The boys she had talked to at Baldwin’s Gardens School hadn’t been like that. They had made her laugh and made jokes and been nice. But she knew better than to argue with Mama when she was as white as she was now and her eyes looked so bright and glittery.

  ‘And you must not talk to people about how we used to be or – or anything except here and now. And –’ She had swallowed. ‘There are things you cannot understand but you must and I don’t know how to – your name, Poppy. You only know a little of your name. You don’t know all of it.’

  Poppy had stared. ‘Of course I know my name! I am Poppy Amberly.’

  ‘There is another part of your name which – which I did not tell you for it was a lot for a little girl like you to learn. Your name is Poppy Amberly Harris. Say it –’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I say so!’ Mildred had flared and then bit her lip and looked anxiously at the door. They were sitting in the small boudoir that Mama had chosen to be her very own private room and it was the only room in the house Poppy liked, for only she and Mama ever came in here, except for Queenie who came each morning to clear and lay the fire and dust and sweep. It was quite a pretty room and it had some of the things from the kitchen at home – the pink china clock and the blue and purple vases, though not the blue and white dishes – and though they looked as miserable as Poppy felt in this house, at least they were there.

  ‘Poppy, darling, please try not to argue with me. I promise when you are a big girl I shall explain it all, but now – I just cannot. Just practise it as I say. Poppy Amberly Harris.’

  ‘Poppy Amberly Harris,’ Poppy said obediently and made a face. ‘It sounds silly.’

  ‘It isn’t silly. It is your name. It is what they will call you at your new school. Don’t forget.’

  ‘Why is it Harris?’

  There had been a little silence and then Mama had got to her feet and gone to the fire to poke it and stir up the flames, though it had been burning quite merrily before. ‘It is – it is your name. Your father’s name.’

&nb
sp; Poppy stared back at her and tried to think. Her father’s name. ‘But I don’t have a father,’ she said.

  ‘Of course you do. Everyone has a father.’

  ‘Who –’

  ‘Poppy, don’t ask so many questions! Just remember you are now Poppy Amberly Harris and go to the nursery and play with the boys. And remember not a word about anything – about the other place we lived in, about anything –’ And now Mama turned and looked at her, and she had one eyebrow raised in a way that made Poppy shake inside. She only did that when she was very, very angry.

  But there was another question she had to ask, and she stopped at the door, her hands twisted in front of her in her pinafore and looked at the floor, instead of looking at Mama, and said, ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My father. Is he dead?’

  ‘Oh, Poppy, please do as you are told! Just go to the nursery and stop asking so many questions! It is very naughty to keep on doing so, and you must stop it. When you go to your new school, they will soon tell you that you must not be impertinent! Now do as you are told and go to the nursery.’

  So Poppy went, and she asked no more questions. But that did not mean she did not think the questions. Sometimes they got mixed up with her stories and her father became a king, which was after all what he ought to be, for was she not a princess in the stories inside her head? Sometimes, though, he was a hero, especially when everyone talked so much about the war and the soldiers. It would have been quite nice if he had been Colonel Baden-Powell, she decided. She saw pictures of him in the newspapers that she sometimes managed to pick up in the kitchen when Queenie and the cook weren’t looking. There were lovely pictures of him in the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror with his nice moustache. It wasn’t as good a moustache as Lord Kitchener’s, though, and sometimes she thought she would rather he was her father. And then decided that she didn’t want him to be a soldier at all, but to be a king, after all. At least for the present.

  This morning, walking home along the Bayswater Road as the last thin glassy sliver of humbug dissolved on her tongue, she wasn’t thinking about her father at all, whoever he was. She was thinking instead of what to do this afternoon, when she went back to school after eating her luncheon. She only went back in the afternoons on Mondays and Thursdays. On the other days they only had school in the mornings so on those days she did not have to think of a second promise to make herself, but today was Thursday. So what should it be? She could, perhaps, pretend to be sick; that was something she was getting quite good at, for she’d done it three or four times in the past few weeks. But it wasn’t as much fun as it might be, for the last time Miss Peach had taken her back to the house early and told Mama who had put her to bed and given her Gregory’s Powders which tasted horrible and gave her a stomach ache. So perhaps it ought to be something different today.

  At the corner of Leinster Terrace Queenie was waiting, her hands tucked into her apron bib and the strings on her frilled cap blowing in the breeze, but she wasn’t scowling as she usually was when her milkman wasn’t there. She had another man with her, a tall one with a floppy hat on and a long coat that was rather dirty.

  They had their heads together and were talking busily as she came up and Poppy tried to walk past Queenie, whom she did not like at all, to go to the house, but she reached out and tugged on her coat.

  ‘Hey, Miss Stuck Up, you wait for me!’ she said.

  ‘I have to go and have my luncheon,’ Poppy said and didn’t look at her. She didn’t like her teeth, which stuck out in front. ‘If I am late Mama will be angry.’

  ‘This is it, is it then?’ the man said and Poppy lifted her head and looked at him. He talked like the people in Leather Lane, and she liked that. It was a much friendlier sound than the way the people talked here in Leinster Terrace. ‘Looks a nice enough little kid to me.’

  ‘You ought to have the care of her,’ Queenie said. ‘Too sharp by half, this one. Cut herself she will, if she isn’t careful.’

  ‘Bet you’re not, eh?’ the man said to Poppy. ‘You look a nice little girl. What’s your name?’

  Poppy stared at him and opened her mouth to answer and then remembered and pulled sharply away from Queenie’s restraining hand and began to run along the Terrace. ‘I’m not allowed to talk to strange men,’ she called over her shoulder and then ran even faster. But the man didn’t follow her. He just grinned at Queenie and tipped his hat to her and turned to go.

  ‘That’s the one I been looking for,’ he said. ‘Ta for your help, ducks. And remember, not a word to no one.’

  And Queenie immediately followed Poppy back to the house and ran to the kitchen to tell everyone there of the common sort of chap who’d come looking for Madam upstairs and her kid and what did they all think was behind it? And none of them knew, but they had plenty of ideas between them.

  40

  ‘I’d never have thought you’d come back here,’ he said and stood there, his shoulders well back so that she could clearly see the empty sleeve, and smiled. ‘It’s good to see you, Millie. But what are you doing here, of all places?’

  She stood just inside the drawing room door and stared at him and he actually saw the colour leave her face so that she was white and pinched. ‘How did you get here?’ she said at length and her voice was harsh and dry. ‘How did you know I was here?’

  He grinned and his forehead made the familiar corrugations she knew so well and her belly tightened at the sight. ‘You’ll never guess,’ he said and chuckled. ‘Remember Ruby? The boy who used to run for me? He’s doing very nicely for himself these days, and when I couldn’t work out where you were – it never entered my head you’d come back here – why, it seemed to be the best thing to do, to ask him to look. And here I am.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said and closed the door behind her. ‘I would have preferred you were not. Why are you here?’

  ‘We’ve got a lot to talk about, Millie! I mean a lot. Look at me – can’t you see we got a lot to talk about?’

  ‘No,’ she said baldly. ‘There is nothing for us to discuss. I would prefer it if you left now.’

  She moved away from the door and went to stand beside the fireplace, where the flames were crackling busily and trying to compete with the June sunlight that was clothing the floor from the tall windows which looked out over the street to the tall houses on the other side. She was not looking at him now, but standing with her head slightly bent and her eyes downcast and he could study her properly.

  She looked, he decided, quite old. Only in her thirties, but looking more like forty; her hair was pulled back hard from her forehead so that her nose, that long wandering nose he had always found rather endearing, seemed to jut from her face even more pugnaciously, and her skin was sallow and beginning to be lined about the mouth and nostrils. She was still thin, though not as thin as she had been when he first met her, and there remained that straightness about her body that offered a man nothing interesting to look at; the bodice of her black shirtwaist was flat, and her waist, above the black skirt, for all the belt that surrounded it, seemed to make small effort to reveal any curves. But for all that it was good to see her, for the fascination she had always had for him was still there, and he moved a little closer and said as winningly as he could, ‘Now, come on, Millie! Let’s be friends again! We used to have a lot of fun, for God’s sake! Don’t stand there looking like a wet weekend. Say you’re glad to see me, say you’re sorry I got myself cut about like this, say something!’

  She looked up then and this time her face seemed a little less hard. ‘I am, of course, very sorry to see you are wounded. I would not wish such a loss on any man.’

  ‘Well, that’s handsome of you, very handsome,’ he said savagely and threw himself into one of the chairs that stood by the far side of the fireplace. ‘I get the fishy eye from the man at the door and I’m left to kick my heels for ten minutes while you decides if you’ll see me or not, and no one offers me so much as a glass of water and t
he best you can do is say you wouldn’t wish such a loss on any man? I’m not any man, I’m Lizah Harris, remember? I’m the father of your kid, remember? We were friends, for God’s sake! Whatever else has happened, do you have to treat me like a piece of dirt? I’m not dirt! I’ve been away fighting for this bloody country. I’ve lost an arm. I tried to save your brother’s life and the best you can do is –’

  She had gone white again and now she said sharply, ‘My brother?’

  He bit his lip and subsided again, furious with himself. He had not meant to say anything at all about Basil. Indeed he had done all he could to forget all that had happened between them. There had been enough long and anguished nights of fury and tears when he had lain in that Durban hospital, eaten up with the pain that came from the ghost of his left arm, cursing Basil Amberly for ever having lived, and cursing him even more for having died. If he had kept out of his way, he, Lizah, would have got away unscathed from that bloody battlefield. If he had not had to carry the man across that patch of bullet-spattered scrub he would have his good left arm still instead of this stupid ugly stump and a bleak future as half a man. He had decided long before he left South Africa that life would only be supportable if he never thought about Basil Amberly again. He could boast about ‘saving his officer’ if he got the chance and it seemed a good tale to tell for business purposes – indeed, he had devised an excellent version of it for use behind the pub bar counters, once he got there – but real thought about the real man; that was never to happen. And here he was already breaking his promise to himself.

  ‘What about my brother?’ Mildred said. ‘He – he died at Spion Kop.’

  ‘I know,’ Lizah mumbled. ‘How do you know? Did you see the casualty list? Was that it? And what do you mean about trying to save his life?’