by Rumer Godden
“Wash them and put them away,” said Vincent. He did not meet Lovejoy’s eyes, nor did she look at him.
Once or twice the colonel and Mrs. Mason had had dinner in the restaurant and Vincent had served them silently, going back to his desk between each course and leaving them alone.
“It brings you business,” said Mrs. Combie helplessly.
She was trying to find a bright side, but, “I don’t want that business, thank you,” said Vincent.
After dinner they would go out, as they went out every evening. Later Vincent heard them come in but he did not hear the colonel go home, and the child is there, thought Vincent. Once or twice he got up and stood hesitating, then he shrugged and sat down again.
One night it had been even later than usual when Vincent switched off the restaurant light to go to bed. Mrs. Combie always left a gas jet burning for him on the second floor, and by its faint glimmer, as he came up, he had seen something white. It was Lovejoy as he had first seen her, sitting on the stairs. But it’s one o’clock! thought Vincent. She was in her ragged pyjamas, a blanket had been put round her, but when he touched her bare feet they were as cold as stones; her head leaned against the banister, and her cheek, when he brushed it with his finger, was wet.
Vincent stood up, his mouth in a small straight line. He had stayed for a moment, looking at the closed door; then he picked Lovejoy up, carried her downstairs, put her on the old sofa in the kitchen, tucked the blanket round her, and went back. After a moment he had quietly and firmly knocked.
Now Lovejoy, washing the ashtray and emptying the dregs of the whisky down the sink, began to sing one of her mother’s songs. Vincent heard her little pipe and sat still listening. Thoughtfully he drew circles on his pad, but Lovejoy was not thinking of Vincent. Tonight, or tomorrow night, thought Lovejoy, her mother would be back in her place, Bertha Serita, in the blue dress, the silver ruff, the little saucy hat, the glittering sequins, her big throaty voice floating out across the audience in the Pier Theatre? The Pavilion Rooms? The Winter Garden? One of them; it did not matter which. Presently the song ceased; Lovejoy had gone back upstairs.
Though the bedroom was perfectly tidy she began to dust it again, wiping down the window with her duster. The glass was dirty with steam and smoke, and slowly, with her finger, she began to write on it. Mother, wrote Lovejoy. Mother. She got as far as the second M when the letters all ran together in a blur. She rubbed them out with the duster and then knelt down, her head on the window sill.
She had meant to cry, but before any tears could come she saw on the sill, level with her eyes but hidden under the curtain where it had been forgotten all these days, the pillbox of seeds.
CHAPTER XI
BEFORE going down into the bomb-ruin, Lovejoy cast her usual wary look up and down the Street, and there was Sparkey, in an overcoat and muffler, being led away by his mother from the newspaper stand for his tea. She crossed over to speak to them.
“Where’s Sparkey been?” she asked.
“Having his spring bronchitis,” said Sparkey’s mother. Lovejoy nodded; that was an annual fixture. Sparkey’s mother looked gaunt and tired and had black marks under her eyes, while Sparkey was more than ever thin and transparent-looking, but they had not forgotten the packet. Sparkey put out his tongue, and, “You leave him alone,” said his mother.
“Of course,” said Lovejoy distantly and walked away.
Sparkey’s mother went on towards Garden Row, but presently Sparkey slipped his hand and came, dodging from one portico to another, back to his step. He watched Lovejoy go through the gap; then he stood up on tiptoe to see more.
I haven’t been for three weeks, Lovejoy was thinking, and she realized what an interference her mother and Uncle Francis had been. Well, he has gone, she thought comfortably, and her mother was back with the Blue Moons where she belonged. Lovejoy felt as if dozens of tight threads that had been sewn tightly into her were being loosened one by one.
As she came across the rubble, she noticed that there were rather more nettles and weeds between the walls; it had been raining, there were puddles on the ground, but the sun was drying them up. There was the usual smell of rubbish and soot and cess. Lovejoy sniffed it as she looked round carefully; then she bent and scuttled between the walls, behind the pyramids, till she came round her own two walls to the garden.
There she stood still.
The packet had said that the seeds would come up; Mr. Isbister had said that too; when Lovejoy had planted them she supposed she had believed it, but it had been more hope than belief. Now, on the patch of earth under the net, had come a film of green; when she bent down and looked closely, she could see that it was made of countless little stalks as fine as hairs, some so fine that she could scarcely see their colour, others vividly showing their new green. They’re blades, thought Lovejoy, blades of grass! In the borders were what she thought at first were tiny weeds, until she saw real weeds among them. The weeds were among the grass too; she could tell them because they were bigger, a different pattern, and when she looked again the borders were peopled with myriad heads, all alike, each head made of two flat leaves, no bigger than pinheads, on a stalk; they were so many and so all the same that she knew they were meant; no weed seeded like that. They must come from a sowing—my sowing, thought Lovejoy suddenly, the seeds I planted.
She knelt down, carefully lifted the net away, and very gently, with her palm, she brushed the hair blades; they seemed to move as if they were not quite rooted, but rooted they were; when she held one in her thumb and finger it did not come away. “It’s like—earth’s fur,” said Lovejoy. She said it aloud in her astonishment, and the sound of her own voice made her jump and look up. It was then she heard the whistle.
It was the kind of whistle that is made by blowing on fingers in the corners of the mouth, a boy’s whistle. Boys! Lovejoy crouched down, tense and still.
•
Lovejoy thought the bomb-ruin was deserted, but there was a camp there and it belonged to Tip Malone.
Sparkey knew why the gang had not been to the camp all this time; just as the girls had suddenly taken to skipping—three months ago not a skipping-rope was to be seen in the Street—now the boys were playing baseball; Tony Zassi, the little American, had taught them. Sparkey knew where they played in the park across the river; they had been there every day all the holidays. “Well, you can’t go,” said Sparkey’s mother. “It’s too far and the ball’s too hard.” Sparkey trembled in case any boy heard her.
But now school had begun and the boys were back, and as Sparkey stood straining to see, while his mother called him, he heard the familiar rabble sound of voices, of scuffling, and the boys came into view, walking and twisting together in a huddle of jeans, corduroy trousers, and shorts, old darned sweaters and jackets, cropped heads, short-cut hair, and weapons, knives and catapults; it was the gang, and in the middle walked Tip. All the Malones were big, and Tip was a head above the other boys; he was carrying a bat—it was not his but Tony’s. Tip was swinging it and talking in his big Irish voice. Sparkey stood up on his step; his eyes glittered so that if his mother had seen them she would have thought he was feverish again and taken him in, but a neighbour had come up to talk to her. Sparkey was husky with emotion as he called, “Tip. Tip Malone. Tip.”
One of the boys, Puggy, glanced across the pavement but when he saw it was only Sparkey he took no notice.
“Tip,” croaked Sparkey. “Tip.”
In a pause in his stream of talk, Tip heard; unlike Puggy, when he saw it was only Sparkey he stopped. The other boys, even Puggy, stopped too. “Well, young ’un?” said Tip.
Sparkey’s bowels could have melted within him at Tip’s kindness but he held firm. He had an end in view. “I know something you don’t,” he said.
“Blimey. What cheek!” said John.
“I do,” said Sparkey.
“What do you know?” asked Tip, amused at this strange little creature with owl eyes and spindly legs.
“’F I tell you kin I be in the gang?” Sparkey flushed as the boys guffawed. They all guffawed but Tip. Tip looked down at Sparkey and said, much as Sparkey’s mother had done, “But you can only be six—or seven,” said Tip as a compliment.
“Aw, c’mon,” said Rory, and Puggy twitched Tip’s sleeve, but Sparkey looked so miserable that Tip was moved to ask, “What do you know?”
“’F I tell can I be in the gang?”
“He can’t know anything,” said Jimmy Howes.
“I do.” Sparkey forgot to croak; his voice was so shrill that it carried right down the Street.
“Ssh,” said Tip. “D’you want everyone to hear?”
There were murmurs from the gang because Tip was taking this seriously. “C’mon,” “Le’s-go,” “Aw, c’mon,” they said, but Tip was a dictator. “Shut your mouths,” he said. “This may be important.”
Sparkey swelled with joy and hope; he almost told there and then but he wanted to make his bargain. “’F I tell—” he began when Tip interrupted.
“You can’t be in the gang,” he said reasonably. “You couldn’t keep up; you’re too small, you’d get knocked about, but I tell you what: we’ll keep a place open for you and for now you can be our look-out, our spy.”
“A—spy!” said Sparkey. His bronchitis had left him weak and he nearly fainted from joy. “I’ll do anything for you, Tip,” he said huskily.
“Well, tell us what you’ve got to tell us, if it is anything,” said Puggy impatiently.
Sparkey drew himself up; he felt twice as big and as important as he had a minute ago.
“I’ll tell Tip,” he said, “not you,” and he looked at Tip.
“There’s a girl,” he said, “on your ruin.”
There was silence while they all turned and looked at the bomb-ruin, where nothing, no life, stirred. “Don’t be bloody silly,” said Tip.
“There is. It’s Lovejoy Mason.” As he told that Sparkey felt an immense satisfaction. Now he was even with her for the packet. “She goes in and out,” he said.
“What for?” asked Rory.
A garden had not crossed Sparkey’s mind, and, “I think she’s building herself a camp,” he said.
“A camp?” They were outraged.
“What d’you know about that!” said Ginger, flabbergasted.
“Blasted cheek,” said John.
Tip’s camp was the best-hidden for miles; screened by a bit of an old wall, it was like an igloo built of rubble; there was only a little hole, close to the ground, by which to go in and out; even the smallest of the boys had to lie down and wriggle. Outside it looked just another pile of bricks and stones; inside it had bunks made of orange boxes, an old meat safe for keeping things in, and an older cooking stove in which it was possible to light a fire or heat up a sausage or soup over a candle; drinks were kept in a hot-water bottle. “It’s real drink, sometimes it’s beer,” whispered Sparkey—he always whispered when he spoke of the camp—and sometimes the boys had cigarettes.
“Do you have to smoke?” Mrs. Malone asked Tip when, for the tenth time, he was sick.
“Yes, I have to,” said Tip desperately. “They wouldn’t think anything of me, else.”
The gang had thought the camp completely secret, but, “She’s there now,” said Sparkey breathlessly. “I just seen her go in.”
For a moment they stood still, then Tip put his two little fingers in the corners of his mouth and whistled. The next moment they were through the gap, down the bank, and in the bomb-ruin. There was a violent noise of boots on stones, of hoots and cries, as they hunted among the walls; then they found, and Lovejoy was surrounded.
One minute the garden was there, its stones arranged, the cornflowers growing, the grass green; the next there were only boots. To Lovejoy they were boots, though most of the boys wore shoes, but boys’ shoes with heavy steel tips to the soles and heels. She crouched where she was, while the boots smashed up the garden, trampled down the grass, and kicked away the stones; the cornflower earth was scattered, the seedlings torn out and pulled in bits. In a minute no garden was left, and Tip picked up the trowel and fork and threw them far away across the rubble. “Now get out,” said Tip to Lovejoy.
Lovejoy stood up; she felt as if she were made of stone she was so cold and hard; then, in a boy’s hand, she saw an infinitesimal bit of green; he was rolling a cornflower between his finger and thumb; suddenly her chin began to tremble.
“D’you know what we do to girls who come on our land?” said Puggy. “We take their pants off and send ’em home without them.”
The boys guffawed again. “Shut up,” said Tip. “I’m talking.”
Tip had seen two things the other boys had not; being in front as they attacked, he had seen the garden whole; he had not had time to look properly but he had a vision of something laid out, green and alive, carefully edged with stones; the other thing he had seen, and saw now, only he did not want to look, was the trembling of Lovejoy’s chin. She had not uttered a sound, not screamed or cried or protested; the Malones were vociferous, Tip connected females with screams and cries, and here was only this small trembling. It made him feel uncomfortable; he remembered how a puppy’s legs, when he had seen it run over and killed, had trembled like that.
“Get out,” he said to Lovejoy but less fiercely. As she still seemed dazed he put his hand on her shoulder to turn her, but he should have known better than to touch her; this was Lovejoy, who had thrown the potato knife, who had spat at Angela; she turned her head and bit Tip’s hand.
She bit as hard as she could, and ran.
When she came through the gap, the boys after her, Sparkey looked down at his shoes and smiled.
CHAPTER XII
ONE of the things that has to be learned is that even sorrow cannot be had in peace, because other people have sorrows too; no boy could catch Lovejoy, and she had had only one thought as she ran, to get to Mrs. Combie, but when she got home Vincent and Mrs. Combie were quarrelling.
It had begun with Mrs. Mason’s fifteen pounds.
“Fifteen pounds?” Cassie had said. “You can pay me back the three you owe me.” But Mrs. Combie could not.
“Never, never borrow money from Cassie, please,” Vincent had said, but once or twice lately Mrs. Combie had been forced to it. Now she was silent, flushed and embarrassed.
“You mean it’s spent already!” said Cassie, her voice shrill. The spots on her face stood out as they did when she was angry. She looked at Mrs. Combie with the small blue eyes that seemed to bore holes—right down into you, thought Mrs. Combie, flinching—and, “You’ve given it to George,” pronounced Cassie.
Mrs. Combie did not let Cassie call Vincent, “George.” “Vincent had bills to pay,” she said distantly.
That was true; the difficulty was to know which to pay first; the cash bills? thought Vincent, or pay the money into the bank? Money going in and out of the account makes it look alive, he thought; but no, better to pay the bills, but which? Bobby and Bax, the High Street grocers? Or Mr. Nichols, the butcher who had been so patient? Or the dairy, or the shoe shop for mending shoes, or Driscoll, the greengrocer?
“If he bought off the barrows and paid cash, which he’s too mighty proud to do, there wouldn’t be bills,” said Cassie. Vincent had gone out to distribute the fifteen pounds as best he could but—though Mrs. Combie felt she would die rather than tell Cassie this—he had not paid anyone. He had come back, his face paper-white with excitement, and so exalted that he seemed to be walking on air although he was carrying a heavy parcel.
In it he had a set of dessert plates in different colours, deep green, royal blue, crimson—Mrs. Combie had never seen such colours—and in the middle of each plate was a painting of a lady’s head, delicately done in ivory or pink with roses.
“Did you get them at Dwight’s?” asked Mrs. Combie uncertainly.
“Dwight’s! They’re Angelica Kauffman. At least, they might be Angelica Kauffman. I’m nearly sure they
are, Ettie. I saw them in a shop off Hanover Square weeks ago. I got them for thirty pounds,” said Vincent.
“Thir—” Mrs. Combie’s voice went quite away; it was a long time before she got it back. “Fifteen pounds down,” Vincent was saying. “The balance over twelve months. I was lucky they let me have them.” He stared at the plates with his soul in his eyes. “But George,” said Mrs. Combie when she could speak, “what are they for?”
“We shall serve dessert on them,” said Vincent, “for very special clients.”
But George, we haven’t any special clients. We haven’t any proper clients at all, except Mr. Manley, and we haven’t—George, it’s fifteen pounds still to pay! Mrs. Combie did not say any of that but it was said in her silence.
“We can get the bank to give us an overdraft,” said Vincent uneasily.
“We have an overdraft, George. Mr. Edwards said he can’t do any more.”
“Well, I’ve always said we should mortgage the house.”
“It is mortgaged, George.”
“Ettie, you’re like a raven, a raven!” said Vincent.
He walked up and down the kitchen, still in his shabby overcoat. “Very well, take them. Sell them,” he burst out at last. “Sell them. Or smash them.”
“Smash them?” said Mrs. Combie, shrinking.
“You have smashed them.” Vincent was shouting again. “Don’t you see that for me they’re smashed?”
Lovejoy heard Mrs. Combie weeping and took herself out of the way upstairs.
•
It was an hour or two later that Cassie burst into the Masons’ room. She never knocked. One does not knock for children.
“There’s a boy wants to see you,” she told Lovejoy.
“I don’t want to see a boy,” said Lovejoy.
“Hoity-toity!” said Cassie. “Well, I’m making poor Mrs. Combie a cup of tea. You’d better come down and have yours now.”