An Episode of Sparrows

by Rumer Godden

  “In Catford Street you can’t sow grass seed now.” Lovejoy puzzled and puzzled how to get over that until one afternoon in school she was sent on a message to the infants’ classroom. It was half-past three but the kindergarten teacher, Miss Challoner, was still there, cutting out paper figures for the next day’s project. Lovejoy threaded her way among the small chairs and tables and, as she stood in front of the teacher delivering the message with parrot correctness, she looked round the room with its sandtray, its brown paper pictures thumbtacked on the wall, its shop, the tadpoles in a battery jar on the window sill, the pots of plants, the big cardboard clock, all the fascinating things the infants had. I wish I was a ninfant, thought Lovejoy, and then she saw, standing on trestles under the window, pans filled with something dense and short and green. She forgot Miss Challoner and tiptoed nearer and looked to make sure; yes, it was green and short and dense. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Gracious, child, haven’t you ever seen mustard and cress?” said Miss Challoner as Mr. Isbister had said about the ivy.

  “It looks like very special grass,” said Lovejoy.

  “It’s for eating.”

  “Eating?” Lovejoy was shocked.

  “You buy it in twopenny packets,” said Miss Challoner, “and sow it thickly; it will come up anywhere, even on flannel.”

  “Even on not much earth?” There was not much earth on the patch of lawn.

  “Yes.”

  “If you sowed it now?”

  “Any time, except in winter.”

  Perhaps Miss Challoner sensed Lovejoy’s burning interest because she opened her desk and said, “I have some over. Would you like these?” and into Lovejoy’s hands she put half a dozen packets. Lovejoy’s thanks were so fervid that Miss Challoner asked her name.

  “You have a very responsive and charming little girl in your class,” Miss Challoner was to tell Lovejoy’s teacher, Miss Cobb.

  “Lovejoy charming?” asked Miss Cobb, who only saw Lovejoy’s inscrutable small mask.

  “I shall expect some cress on bread and butter in about ten days,” Miss Challoner called to Lovejoy when she saw her on the stairs. After that it was strange how Lovejoy disappeared as soon as she saw Miss Challoner.

  The mustard and cress was sown thickly all over the patch; the mustard seeds were like tiny dark yellow balls, the cress as fine as grass seed, but oblong, nut brown; the cat net had been lost when the gang raided the first garden; in any case it would not have been big enough to stretch over the new lawn, but Tip and Lovejoy crisscrossed black cotton from side to side; it looked professional again, and Tip was impressed. “They’ll be up in five days,” Lovejoy told him. She had the prospect of a lawn, but there were still only the eight little seedlings in the beds—“And they’re a mistake,” said Lovejoy restlessly.

  “What are you thinking of now?” said Tip. Lovejoy did not answer but he knew. Something special.

  Sid’s boy had left, and the next Saturday Tip began work with Sid and Lucy. “Delivering ice,” said Tip. “Ugh.” On Monday he came to Lovejoy in the garden.

  “Here’s half a crown,” he said. He might have been a husband handing over his first pay packet; he gave it proudly but resentfully.

  When I was single,

  My pockets did jingle—

  Tip might have sung that. “I went round with Sid the whole blooming day, and was that ice dirty and heavy!” He grumbled but all the same he was proud that he, Tip, had earned his first real money—a huge big lot, he thought, but Lovejoy held the coin with her head bent over it. “Well?” said Tip belligerently.

  “It isn’t enough,” said Lovejoy.

  “Not enough! It’s half a crown!” He sat down beside her, feeling suddenly tired. “What do you want?” he demanded.

  “A box of pansies,” said Lovejoy instantly.

  “A box?” said Tip in alarm. “You said they were fivepence each. A whole box would be—” Words failed him.

  “Ten-and-six,” said Lovejoy calmly.

  She said nothing more, and Tip’s heart sank; then, sitting beside her, he found himself distracted from the pansies. He was noticing how she had a ridge of very fine short hairs on the back of her neck, soft as down, mouse-coloured but tipped with gold; they looked as if they were protecting the tender knobs of her spine; gently Tip put out his finger and felt those little bones. Then he sighed. It was no good; even when Lovejoy was difficult and ungrateful he found it impossible to be angry; instead he began to coax her. “Couldn’t you have those little white things?” said Tip.

  “Alyssum,” said Lovejoy dully.

  “They’re pretty,” urged Tip, “and only ninepence a dozen. For half a crown you could have more’n three dozen of those.”

  Lovejoy turned her head to look at him. “What would white look like against white stone?” she asked, like stone herself.

  “But they’re cheap,” Tip pleaded.

  Lovejoy did not want to drive Tip—she would have worked herself, the whole day with Sid, if Sid would have taken her—she did not want to be hard, but it was that or spoil the garden. “People will want to drag you down,” Vincent had said. “Don’t let them. They must not.”

  It was strange how things grew, not only plants, ideas, thought Lovejoy; a little while ago—and now she conveniently shrank into little the time that had seemed so endless—a little while ago half a crown to spend, to buy the trowel and fork, or seeds, would have seemed impossible riches—but that was seeds, thought Lovejoy; she had not known about seedlings then, or pansies. There were other flowers, not only alyssum; lobelia, for instance, was a good bright blue, or there were dark red button daisies, but, “Pansies are all sorts of colours,” she said yearningly. “Purple and yellow and brown and gold.” They were more than that; she searched for a word, and a phrase from Mrs. Combie’s Cornish past that Mrs. Combie sometimes remembered came to her. “They’re handsome,” she said.

  “All right,” said Tip. “I’ll go on with Sid,” and, as if he felt that gave him a right over Lovejoy, he put his hand on her neck.

  “You’ll only have to give me three more Saturdays,” said Lovejoy under his hand. “I’ll get the sixpence,” she said generously. Then she stopped, her face unhappy again. “In three weeks it’ll be too late,” she wailed. “Mr. Isbister says pansies have to be planted now.” Tip took away his hand.

  •

  “Hail Mary,” said Lovejoy as she slid into the nearest kneeling-chair. “I want eight shillings, please.”

  It sounded like an order and she blushed. She had not even lit a candle, and even Lovejoy knew that the Virgin Mary did not keep a store from which one could order; the candle shilling, Liz and Charles for Vincent, had been unwonted favours, unwontedly quick. “You have to pray for things for ages,” said Tip, “and you don’t always get them then.”

  “Why not?” asked Lovejoy, who wanted a quick return.

  “God doesn’t want you to have them, I s’pose,” said Tip.

  Lovejoy looked sternly into the church at the plaster figures. “Which one is God?” she asked.

  Lovejoy had an idea she could circumvent God but, all the same, at the moment she was a little anxious. She had knelt down on the left of the chapel, which meant that the statue was looking away from her; was that a bad sign? Lovejoy did not know any prayers but she knew a hymn that Mrs. Combie sometimes sang, a whining little hymn with a repellent tune. “Gentle Jesus, meekanmile.” Lovejoy started to whisper it; whispers seemed fitting here—lips have to make the prayers, you can’t just think them, she thought. The church was always filled with that soft pattering. “. . . meekanmile, look ’pona . . .”

  But, though she whispered, Lovejoy was thinking about something else; perhaps because of the small miracle of Liz and Charles—“They were near the restaurant. Why shouldn’t they go there,” Tip had asked, but Lovejoy insisted it was a miracle—she kept thinking, not about Gentle Jesus but about the restaurant. She could not help it. She fixed her eyes on the statue, it
s pink and blue, its gilt, and plaster lilies, and the restaurant came into her mind.

  There was only one topic there now, the big refrigerator. Vincent said he must get one, and the harder Lovejoy tried to pray, the more she heard Mrs. Combie’s perpetual words, “One hundred and forty-four pounds! Oh, George!”

  “But it’s hire-purchase, Ettie. Forty-four pounds down and six pounds, six-and-nine a month for eighteen months. That’s easy terms. It’s such a sensible way to buy things!” said Vincent. “Look ’pona little child,” prayed Lovejoy. “Only six pounds, six-and-ninepence a month.”

  Lovejoy was suddenly still on her knees. Then she made the sign of the cross as Tip had taught her. “Thank you,” said Lovejoy earnestly to the statue and she tiptoed out.

  That afternoon she went to Vincent’s favourite greengrocer shop, Driscoll’s in Mortimer Street off the High. Mr. Driscoll, wearing a white apron doubled round his waist, was standing in the middle of the shop talking to a man whom Lovejoy thought she knew; the man had on a long old-fashioned overcoat and a bowler hat and was pointing to vegetables and fruit with a stick; as he pointed them out Mr. Driscoll wrote on his pad and a boy, in another white apron, lifted the fruit or vegetables out and laid them on pink tissue paper in a box. After a moment Lovejoy recognized the man; it was Mr. Manley.

  “Two asparagus,” said Mr. Manley, pointing to the fat bluish and cream bundles. “See they’re slender, none of your thick sticks, John, and is that English spinach?”

  “Just in,” said Mr. Driscoll.

  “Put in a pound,” said Mr. Manley, “and three of Jersey potatoes.”

  As Mr. Manley went on and Lovejoy listened she began to think that Vincent was wrong; peaches, new potatoes, asparagus—it seemed that Mr. Manley had very good meals in his house.

  “That’s the lot,” he said at last in the abrupt way that offended Vincent. “Send them round quickly.”

  “The boy will take them straight away,” said Mr. Driscoll.

  Most people, Lovejoy knew, did not have their green-groceries sent straight away, and she knew from the battles between Mrs. Combie and Vincent that Driscoll’s was expensive. Even the people from the river flats did not buy their vegetables here but in the despised High Street. Driscoll’s was for the Square people, for Somebodies. Mr. Manley must be Somebody, thought Lovejoy, even if Vincent did not think so.

  She knew quite well that she herself was very far from a Somebody but she had come because, for what she wanted, it was no use going to the big High Street shops or to Woolworth’s; there they held on to the paper of plants until they had the money; besides there were no plants better or fresher than the ones in the boxes outside Driscoll’s; she had often looked at them longingly.

  “Well, little girl? What can I do for you?” Mr. Driscoll had come back from taking Mr. Manley to the door. Lovejoy was glad she had put on her checked coat even if she had to leave it open because it would not meet and it hurt under the arms. “Do you think Mother will send me a new coat soon?” she had asked Mrs. Combie.

  “She should,” said Mrs. Combie, “and shoes. You do need shoes.”

  “She should but she hasn’t,” said Cassie.

  “Couldn’t you write and ask her?” Lovejoy kept her eyes on Mrs. Combie, ignoring Cassie.

  “I do write,” said Mrs. Combie, later and privately to Lovejoy, “I write but she doesn’t answer.”

  Lovejoy had done her best; she had brushed her hair until it glistened, and put on clean socks and whitened her plimsolls. “If you want a part you must look as if you didn’t need it,” her mother had told her often. “Look good, even if you don’t feel it.” Lovejoy saw Mr. Driscoll’s eye take her in and felt his approval. “What can I do for you, little lady?” he asked.

  “I want—” but before she had time to finish her sentence Mr. Manley had come back.

  “John, I forgot. I shall want some special flowers on Thursday—” Then he paused, seeing Lovejoy. “I beg your pardon,” he said to her as if she were quite grown up. “I didn’t see John was serving.”

  “The little girl can wait,” said Mr. Driscoll at once, but Mr. Manley waved his stick in his strange abrupt way and said, “Go on. Go on. Strict turns, John. No favouritism.”

  “Well, what do you want?” Mr. Driscoll said to Lovejoy.

  Lovejoy was fingering the half-crown nervously, trying not to let it get sticky, but her voice was high and clear as she answered. “I want to hire-purchase a box of pansies,” she said.

  “Hire-purchase?”

  “Yes, on the instalment plan,” said Lovejoy and, as Mr. Driscoll did not appear to understand, “on easy terms,” she said.

  “She knows all the words,” said Mr. Driscoll to Mr. Manley.

  “I’ll give you half a crown down,” said Lovejoy, “and half a crown a week for three weeks and sixpence at the end.” She held out the half a crown, but Mr. Driscoll, though he was laughing, shook his head.

  “We don’t sell plants like that,” he said.

  “You do if there’s a guarantee,” said Mr. Manley. Mr. Driscoll stopped laughing. It became suddenly serious—as it was to Lovejoy. “Do you know this child?” asked Mr. Driscoll.

  “No,” said Mr. Manley, which was true. Lovejoy had seen him many times but he had not seen her. “I don’t know her, but I think she’ll pay. Give me your pad.”

  Mr. Manley wrote: Pansies, one box. Ten shillings. He ignored the sixpence. “When you give a big order, ignore the pence,” he told Lovejoy. Lovejoy nodded, and at the bottom of the small sheet Mr. Manley wrote 2/6 four times. “You cross one off a week,” he said to Lovejoy. “Got your half-crown?” She nodded again. “Hand it over.” She handed it to Mr. Driscoll, who crossed off the first 2/6. “See that he does it each time,” said Mr. Manley gravely, “otherwise he might cheat you”; and underneath he wrote his own name. Again he wrote “Manley” without the initial.

  “Haven’t you a name?” asked Lovejoy. “Not a surname, a name they call you by? What is your name?”

  “Reginald Marmaduke Kitchener Spot,” said Mr. Manley and walked out of the shop.

  The pansies went right round the beds, filling them completely. “You see,” said Lovejoy to Tip, and indeed their colours against the stone were like jewels, thought Lovejoy. They were not really like jewels, they were flower colours, truthful and glowing, but they were as precious as jewels to her. “You’re mad about that garden,” Tip grumbled.

  The mustard and cress was not as good; it was showing, the mustard in flat double leaves, the cress in tiny narrow ones like green feathers; in a short while it would be as high as grass but it had not come through exactly as Lovejoy had meant. “Those seeds must have crept about under the earth,” she said, furious.

  There were patches that were almost bald. “They’ll thicken up,” said Tip comfortingly, but there was one place about which Tip could say nothing at all, a big, bare patch, almost a ring of earth opposite the column. He looked at it in silence; it was plain he thought it very ugly, and Lovejoy’s pride was stung. “I meant it to be like that,” she said.

  “Did you?” asked Tip doubtfully.

  “Yes,” said Lovejoy. Her adroitness always made Tip marvel; he knew quite well she had invented this about the patch, but, “Wait,” she said now and went off among the rubble so much as if this had really been in her mind that Tip was half convinced.

  Presently she came back with something round and set with shattered bits of glass.

  “What is it?” asked Tip.

  Neither of them knew; it had been a glass bell that held everlasting flowers for a grave; its bottom was zinc, edged with a painted white tin frill. “Isn’t it pretty?” asked Lovejoy. The glass was broken now, but, “It will make a very special sort of flowerpot,” said Lovejoy. “It fits here, on the patch,” and she set it down and looked at it, breaking off one or two bits of glass that were left. The bare patch was hidden. “Isn’t it pretty?” asked Lovejoy again and then she said, “We must fill it with earth.�
��

  “Not more earth!” said Tip.

  “More earth,” said Lovejoy inexorably.

  “But what will you put in it?” asked Tip. He sounded as if he were alarmed.

  Lovejoy did not answer for a moment. She looked away, thoughtfully and dreamily; then, “Do you remember Mr. Isbister’s summer holiday?” she asked. “Do you remember Jiminy Cricket?”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE old woman in the vinegar bottle went too far; there came a day when the little fish, tired out, said, “Go back to your vinegar bottle,” and the house, furniture, new clothes, maid, and pony-carriage disappeared, but Vincent and Lovejoy had not heard any more than Tip or Mrs. Combie of that story.

  With the old woman it had been a car; the pony-carriage, she complained, was too slow. With Vincent it was the big refrigerator. A duck had gone bad in the larder, and Vincent brought up, for the hundredth time, it seemed to Mrs. Combie, the question of the big refrigerator. “I tell you we must have it,” said Vincent.

  “We can’t, George. We can’t pay for it.”

  “Then we must borrow. Now, now is the moment,” cried Vincent. “At last it has happened what I said. I begin to gather my clientele, the clientele I want.” If Vincent were moved he grew foreign. “No, not want,” said Vincent passionately. “Not want, deserve. Without a big refrigerator—” he began.

  “George, a big refrigerator costs—”

  “You’re always dinning figures into me,” shouted Vincent. “Figures, and it hurts.”

  Mrs. Combie might have said that it was Vincent who dinned figures into her where they hurt much more; she had had a very painful interview with Mr. Edwards, the bank-manager, that weekend and now she had to persist. “Why not wait?” she asked in a breathless voice, twisting the overall strings tightly round her finger. “Wait till more people like the lady and gentleman come.”

  “And give them duck gone bad?” asked Vincent icily.

  •

  “Would you care to try something else tonight?” said Vincent to Mr. Manley. “Something more interesting. Aiguillettes de canard sauvage?” said Vincent smoothly. “Chicken sauté à l’ancienne?” That was Vincent’s specialty. “Or may I suggest fillet of sole à la Russe?”