Saffy's Angel

by Hilary McKay

  ‘But did he say you would have passed?’ demanded Indigo.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Well then. That’s brilliant.’

  ‘She’s sad because he didn’t say “Caddy darling”,’ Rose explained patiently to him. ‘He’s got this weird old girlfriend called Droopy Di so he can’t have our Caddy.’

  ‘He can’t have our Caddy anyway!’ said Indigo, indignantly.

  He can if he wants, thought Caddy, as she bent over the black and white diagrams of the structure of the mammalian heart in her biology book. Biologists, thought Caddy, rapidly sketching in the paths of blood circulation with red and blue pencils, make it seem so simple. The same heart whoever you are, hamster or human, and no reference in the whole book to the Effects and Consequences of falling in love.

  ‘Did you think Saffron sounded happy when you talked to her?’ Indigo asked, interrupting the red and blue pencils, and Caddy, after a moment of surprised thought, said, ‘No.’

  ‘She would have done, if she’d found her angel,’ said Indigo.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Rose. ‘And if she hasn’t found her angel she won’t care a bit about cathedrals and ice cream and all that stuff.’

  ‘She’d just be saying that for something to say,’ agreed Indigo.

  ‘It’s hard to tell how anyone really feels from a telephone call,’ pointed out Caddy. ‘People use happy voices when they’re sad, and tired voices when they’re thinking…We’ll just have to wait. Perhaps everything is perfectly all right.’

  ‘I bet it isn’t,’ said Rose.

  Rose, as usual, was right. What had mattered most to Saffron, that Wednesday in Siena, had been the closed green doors and windows of the house where once she had lived. She and Sarah had not just explored the square together. Over and over again they had made their way back to Number Sixteen, Via S. Francesco. They had pressed their faces against the cracks in the locked garden door. Saffron, remembering the noise of running water that went with her dream, had stood motionless, straining to hear the sound again. They had seen and heard nothing. That was what had been wrong with that Wednesday for Saffron. And also the fact that everywhere she went she saw other people’s angels.

  Sarah noticed them too and said, ‘No wonder you were so fond of yours! They seem to have been in fashion here for about eight hundred years!’

  On Thursday when Saffron rang home, she told them in detail the story of Sarah’s father and his triumph with the fountain. Saffron explained how Mr Warbeck had been talking with the hotel manager (in good loud English with plenty of eye contact). And how Mr Warbeck had remarked that although the hotel was excellent and everything was fine, the fountain in the centre of the square was causing him considerable distress. The angle of the top jet, said Mr Warbeck, was out by possibly as much as five degrees (here he produced a piece of paper with a sketch he had made), and the water lost, he had calculated (and here was the calculation), must be several gallons a day. Or litres, of course. A lot anyway. And the adjustment needed was so simple (Mr Warbeck produced a third piece of paper illustrating the necessary correction) that it really ought to be dealt with before he, Mr Warbeck, was driven mad. In England, explained Sarah’s father, you would call the town council and have it put right because you paid your taxes to have things run properly.

  Astonishingly, (at least, it astonished Sarah’s father) it seemed that in Italy things were much the same. Because the hotel manager took away Mr Warbeck’s pieces of paper and made a telephone call, and later that day an engineer came out. And with a wrench and a ladder and Mr Warbeck’s diagrams he made the alteration required. And now the people in the hotel were treating Sarah’s father as a hero, and the Warbecks had had free wine sent to their table, and Sarah’s father said the age of miracles was not yet over and the Italians were fine and efficient people. You might wait weeks before it was fixed in England, he said, and there would be no free wine attached either.

  This was what Saffron told Caddy and Indigo and Rose on Thursday. No mention of her old home. No mention of angels. This time there was no need for Indigo to ask, ‘Do you think Saffron sounded happy?’ because there was no doubt about it. She sounded miserable.

  ‘We’re coming home tomorrow,’ she had told Caddy, ‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Saffron,’ said Caddy. ‘Have you been back to the house? Your house, I mean.’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  ‘Well, have you seen into the garden? Have you been in the garden? Have you tried? What about your…’

  ‘The door is locked!’ snapped Saffron. ‘Of course I’ve been! Of course I’ve tried! The door is always locked and we’re leaving tomorrow!’

  ‘Don’t cry, Saffy!’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Saffron, and slammed down the phone.

  Mr and Mrs Warbeck noticed how subdued Saffron was that evening, but kindly put it down to a combination of tiredness, the emotion of seeing her old home again, and worry because the holiday was nearly over and soon she would be back at the Banana House, explaining why she had stowed away in someone else’s car without even leaving a note to say goodbye.

  Sarah understood. She knew the truth was that the green shuttered house on the corner behind the square was filling Saffron’s thoughts. She and Saffron had been back to it very often now. Every odd moment, before outings, after meals, between shops and ice creams and photographs by the fountain (leaking and unleaking) they had made dashes to the house. Sometimes Saffron had gone alone, but more often Sarah had been with her, bumping across the cobbles and along the narrow pavement in her wheelchair, faster every time. They had knocked, but no one answered. The shutters were always closed and the doors were always locked.

  Sarah lay in bed very late on Thursday night and thought about the house. She thought and thought and finally she called softly across the bedroom,

  ‘Super Hero! Wake up!’

  ‘I am awake,’ replied Saffron at once. ‘I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘I’ve got a plan.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Somebody lives there.’

  Saffron did not ask where Sarah was talking about because she knew perfectly well.

  ‘Somebody lives there,’ continued Sarah. ‘Think of the flowers in the window boxes upstairs. Somebody waters those flowers.’

  Saffron hoisted herself up on one elbow and looked across at Sarah. She was right, somebody must water the flowers.

  ‘Perhaps they are on holiday,’ she suggested.

  ‘No,’ said Sarah. ‘I bet those flowers are watered every day. Same as the ones in the square. Early in the morning, I’ve heard them doing it. And that’s when we ought to go. Before whoever waters the flowers goes out.’

  ‘We could try.’

  ‘I must see into that garden before we go home!’ said Sarah, forgetting to whisper in her earnestness. ‘I must see if your angel is there. If it is, there’s all sorts of things we could do. There might be a way of buying it. We could ask my parents to help. Anything would be better than coming away and not ever knowing if it was still there.’

  ‘I think so too,’ said Saffron. ‘I’ve been trying to work out how I could climb the wall. Even if I could only get high enough to look over the top for a moment it would be something. If I began at the house, with your chair to start me off, and then stepped on to the windowsill, perhaps I could use the shutters somehow to get me high enough to get a hold on the top of the wall. Then I would have to swing across somehow. If I could get my arms over I think I could do it…’

  Saffron paused. Sarah’s eyes were quite startling. Huge and shining and fixed on Saffron’s face as she visualised this epic ascent. In the shadows of her dark hair, her face was as white as her pillows, the hot Italian sunshine had not touched it at all. She looked very small. A small pattern of shadows in a big bed. Sarah could not climb the wall by way of windowsill and shutters, but she did not say so. She had hoped herself for an early morning miracle, somebody watering flowers.

  ‘What could I
do?’ she asked. ‘While you were climbing.’

  ‘You would have to wait,’ said Saffron, and as soon as she had said the words she wished she could unsay them. After all, climbing the wall would be the very last bit of the long adventure, planned by Sarah, that had brought them to Siena. And Sarah would be left out of it. Suddenly Saffron had a picture in her mind of Sarah waiting at the bottom of the wall, and she was angry with herself.

  Something in Saffron changed at that moment. She knew all about feeling left out. Ever since the afternoon when she was eight and had read the paint chart in the Banana House kitchen she had known that feeling. It had been even worse when her grandfather died and it seemed that she had been left out again. That was why she had wanted her angel so badly; proof that she mattered as much as anyone else.

  ‘I couldn’t really climb that wall,’ she said. ‘And if I could, what if I got caught? What would I say?’

  ‘You’d think of something.’

  ‘No. It was a stupid idea. Let’s try your way, early in the morning.’

  ‘Before breakfast?’

  ‘Yes. All right, Mission Control?’

  ‘All right,’ said Sarah. ‘All right, Super Hero.’

  At the Banana House only Indigo and Rose were asleep. Eve had gone to bed, but her mind was on something she had bought for herself that morning. It was her reward for her success in the Building Society window, a large new canvas, a handful of new brushes, and four new enormous tubes of oils.

  After a while Eve could resist the temptation no longer. She sneaked down the stairs and out to the shed. It was one o’ clock in the morning. Friday. On Friday Saffron would begin the long journey home. Eve thought of them lovingly, one by one. Cadmium, Saffron, Indigo, Rose. Soon they would all be together again.

  Caddy could not sleep because Friday was the day of her driving test. This was very scary in itself, but made worse by the fact that if she passed she would probably never see Michael again because she wouldn’t be having any more lessons. If she failed she would definitely never see him again. For one thing, Michael wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her: he liked glittering successes like Droopy Di who passed first time. And for another thing, her father had said several times recently that if Caddy could not pass after nearly a hundred lessons with an instructor there must be something badly wrong with him, and they would have to try someone else instead. Someone older.

  ‘Michael is old,’ Rose had told her father when she happened to hear this opinion. ‘He is twenty-four.’

  ‘Much older,’ said Rose’s father. ‘My age.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Rose. ‘That old. Very old. Poor Caddy!’

  Chapter Eleven

  The little square looked different in the early morning sunlight.

  ‘It’s the shadows,’ said Saffron. ‘They’re in different places. And there are less people.’

  ‘No tourists,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Except us.’

  ‘We’re not tourists,’ said Sarah. ‘You’re not anyway, you were born here! And look how people are beginning to get to know us!’

  It was true, in a way. Smiles and waves of recognition from the shop and café owners getting ready for the new day followed them around the square. Sarah and Saffron smiled and waved back at them until the sight of somebody with a hose pipe watering tubs of geraniums gave them a sudden sense of urgency.

  ‘Come on!’ said Sarah, and they hurried away from the sunny square, on down the familiar side street, deserted as usual, and turned the corner.

  ‘There!’ said Sarah, a moment later, and she pointed in triumph.

  The flowers in the window boxes were sparkling and wet. Splashes were falling past the open green shutters and landing all around. Clearly they had been watered only a minute or two before.

  ‘Let’s knock,’ suggested Sarah.

  ‘Let’s try the garden door first,’ said Saffron.

  They left the dripping flowers and went back round the corner to the garden door and Saffron reached up to the big iron ring that lifted the latch. They had tried it so often since Sarah’s first attempt that it no longer seemed a wrong thing to do.

  ‘It’s turning!’ Saffron said, almost whispering. ‘It’s open! Are we going in?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sarah, impatiently. ‘What do you think we came here for?’

  Saffron pushed the door wide open.

  It was a little white paved garden. Small pointed trees in tubs. The sound of water falling from a miniature fountain, a bright blue sky above and walls all around. They heard a voice call out sharply, and then hurrying footsteps. A tiny old woman, dark haired and wrinkled, appeared from the back of the house and came running towards them, calling all the time in very fast Italian.

  Suddenly, she paused as if frozen, and then began running and calling again, but this time her words were English, ‘Stay! Stay! Wait!’

  Sarah guessed what was happening straight away, but Saffron, caught in a tangle of past and present, was too confused to do anything but stand and stare.

  ‘Wait! After so long! After so long, Linda’s Saffron!’ exclaimed the old lady, and Sarah, who knew that Linda was Saffron’s mother’s name, realised that her friend had been recognised almost at once.

  ‘Linda’s Saffron!’ repeated the old lady, suddenly sweeping Saffron into her arms for a hug, and then standing back again to look at her. ‘Saffron!’ and she began laughing and crying and patting Saffron’s cheeks.

  ‘Linda was my mother,’ said Saffron, speaking at last.

  ‘Si, si, and you are Saffron and you are so exactly like her that I knew you at once! Like Linda! But you were so young when you went away, I think you have forgotten Antonia who lived above you?’

  ‘I think I’ve forgotten everything,’ said Saffron, and she looked and sounded dazed as she spoke. ‘Everything except the garden.’

  ‘You remember the garden?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Saffron, as she gazed around. ‘I thought it was bigger, but I do remember it. Is it your garden?’

  ‘Si, si. My house and garden. I live upstairs and you and your mamma live downstairs. You play in the garden, all day long.’

  ‘Do you mind me coming back? We just came in. We should have knocked.’

  The old lady who was Antonia swept Saffron back into her arms again and said of course she did not mind, of course not, of course not! Nor for the friend. Was it not Saffron’s home, and why had she not come back years before, and where did she live now? And how was her grandfather? And would anyone believe how often and often Antonia had come into the garden and thought of Saffron and her angel?

  ‘My angel?’ repeated Saffron.

  Antonia said, ‘Si, si, her angel in the garden.’

  ‘Saffy’s angel?’ asked Sarah eagerly. ‘What about Saffy’s angel?’

  ‘Her little stone angel,’ said Antonia, and went on to describe how every day, when Saffron was small and lived downstairs in the green shuttered house where she, Antonia, lived upstairs, Saffron had run outside to talk to her angel. And from the petals of the yellow rose that grew up the garden wall, (‘See the rose!’ said Antonia, interrupting herself to spin Sarah around to look at the old climbing rose tumbling down the wall behind her), Saffron had made for her angel yellow hats and shoes.

  ‘Yellow hats and yellow shoes!’ said Antonia, rubbing tears from her eyes, and then she had to pause to embrace Saffron all over again, and be surprised all over again, and Saffy had to gather some fallen petals from the yellow rose and sniff their faint sweet smell. When Antonia saw her do that she rushed to pick roses for her, laughing and flapping her hands at the thorns, and handing them eagerly to Saffron one by one. ‘Hold carefully!’ she said, as she passed over each flower. ‘Hold very carefully!’

  ‘But what happened to Saffy’s angel?’ asked Sarah a little bit impatiently, because the thing that had struck her first and most forcefully about this whole perfect little dream Italian garden was that it contained no angel. No angel an
ywhere. And that was what they had come for. Not roses.

  Saffron’s hands were full of roses.

  ‘Saffy’s angel?’ repeated Sarah, persisting in sticking to the point, no matter how many roses barred the way. ‘Saffy’s angel?’

  ‘Not Saffy’s angel in those days,’ said Antonia, passing Sarah a rose for herself (‘Hold very carefully!’). ‘My angel then! A long time ago, and so sad. You know how it was with Saffron’s mother?’

  Sarah nodded.

  ‘Terrible. And so Saffron went to England with her grandpapa. You know?’

  Sarah nodded again.

  ‘So the angel also went to England!’

  ‘What!’

  ‘With Saffron’s grandpapa. He took my angel away. One week only after he left with Saffron, and I thought I would not see either again, he came back. To buy my angel for Saffron. I would have given, but he said, no, he must buy!’

  ‘Oh, Saffy!’ breathed Sarah.

  ‘Then off again to England, and I know this time I will not see him again. Write, I told him. Tell me about Saffron. He never wrote.’

  Somehow Saffron seemed to have dropped her roses. Now she was on her knees, gathering them together again.

  ‘He was ill,’ she said, looking up at Antonia. ‘He couldn’t. He was ill for a long time before he died…’

  ‘He has died? Your grandpapa?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘No one even knew he came back here. To Siena. They only knew he had a car crash. I suppose it must have happened on his way home.’

  ‘Not another car crash?’

  ‘Yes. And after it he didn’t talk. He didn’t talk to anyone, ever, for years and years and years.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Once he said “Saffron”. “Saffron”. That was all.’