‘I hope you know you got poor Diana the sack,’ said Ellen, raising her voice so that Jocko the gardener could hear. ‘Nice thing, I must say, when boys like you can do what they want and we have to suffer for it. I hope you’re satisfied. I hope you’re pleased with yourself. Losing a poor girl with a sick dad her job, to say nothing of giving me a lot of extra work. Hope you’re proud of yourself.’
She went inside, slamming the wire door, and he heard her slapping dishes into the sink and muttering. A buzzer croaked and Ellen’s face, like a hornet behind the wire, buzzed back to him.
‘Hear that? That’s old Mrs Bult ringing for her breakfast and that means I’ve got to take the tray up and down myself, thanks to you.’
Vanessa, cool as a cucumber, bundled him into his school overcoat.
‘Look here,’ she said. ‘The next time you feel the urge to throw things out of the bathroom window, I’ll give them to you and warn everyone to keep out of the kitchen garden until you’re finished.’ She buttoned him up rapidly. ‘It so happens that most of those face lotions came from Paris and are unobtainable in this so-called country.’
She thumped his school cap on to his head as if she were corking a bottle, hurting his ears, tucking them in.
‘However, that is only incidental to the fact that you might have seriously injured someone.’
Cynthia Lawson’s mother took him to school, where the children peppered him with questions as to why he had had to leave early the day before.
‘I had to go to the dentist,’ he said.
‘You’re a liar,’ said Cynthia.
‘I’m not.’
‘You are. And you know what we do to liars in our club? They have to be initiated all over again.’
‘Shut up,’ he said. But to be safe he stayed in the lavatory during playtime.
‘Cowardy custard,’ said Cynthia. ‘We won’t have cowardy custards in the club.’
He said he didn’t care; who wanted to be in their silly club? When he got home he found that all his books were gone from the bedroom shelf including the brand-new Doctor Dolittle.
‘No reading for two weeks,’ announced Vanessa. ‘And no train.’ She was pulling on white gloves, going out. ‘Actually I’m letting you off jolly lightly but I want you to think about it. I want you to think carefully about the tortoise and the hare. Learn something from this.’
He watched her crunch off down the gravel driveway like a queen to the car waiting outside the gate.
‘Come here,’ cried Cousin Ettie from her room, and he went to her gladly. She was sitting at the dressing table in a mauve dressing gown and putting eau de cologne on her face and around her old neck.
When she held him he could tell by the way her chest was going up and down quickly that she was crying.
She said, between gasps and silences, ‘She’s very hurt and upset, lambkin, but it’s not entirely your fault.’ She held him away and he saw that her face was all screwed up and red. ‘It’s not my fault either,’ she said. She seemed to be angry. ‘Even though I let her bring me here. I won’t be blamed all my life for everything! I won’t be blamed because I want to go home.’
He said, ‘I want to go home too,’ but Cousin Ettie wasn’t listening.
‘Damn,’ said Cousin Ettie, and very unexpectedly she snatched up a silver hairbrush and threw it across the room. She was shaking now. ‘I won’t be blamed for everything just because I’m not wanted.’
She put her head down on the dressing table and wept loudly.
‘Oh, lamb, what can we do?’
Then he had the great idea. It was better than being bad, and quicker.
‘We could escape.’
The lunch gong rang, downstairs as if Ellen had overheard and was giving the alarm. (‘Prisoners escaped. Call the guard.’)
Ettie said, ‘What?’
‘We could escape,’ he whispered.
The gong boomed through the house and died away, leaving the walls shivering with thrilling horror, and he saw Ettie and himself flitting over the lawn in black cloaks at dead of night; Lila waiting in the shadows with a coach, George masked and ready to whip up the horses and speed them all away to safety with Logan in Bacchus Marsh.
No. That was all storybook stuff. Go now, escape while Vanessa was out, as fast as they could. In a taxi.
He tugged at Ettie’s hand. ‘Come on,’ he said.
‘Ah, sweet thing.’ Ettie reached for the cologne bottle. ‘Nobody escapes. Well, we all belong to each other—that’s the wretched curse of it, petkin. You’ll find out one day.’
‘Lunch is on the table, please,’ screamed Ellen below.
Well, maybe Ettie couldn’t escape, couldn’t run fast enough. But he could.
He went downstairs, hearing Ettie close her door and lock it. He had lunch alone, taking no notice of Ellen’s sour face, and when Mrs Lawson called to drive him to dancing class, he went meekly because now he had a plan.
At dinner that night, Vanessa said suddenly, ‘In case you’re interested, your father has gone home.’
So Logan had escaped. Logan had known what to do. Well, you just wait, he said silently to Vanessa, who was helping herself to peas and smiling at lemony Ellen; reminding her to take up Mrs Bult’s tray.
On the windy, cold Friday afternoon, George came for him, and Vanessa, seeing George plod up the drive, said:
‘Here comes George. You may tell them anything you please, PS. It’s a matter of indifference to me what you blab to them about your father, but if you have a grain of sense, you won’t tell them about locking yourself in the bathroom. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’
The doorbell rang as if George was angry. Vanessa smiled and said, ‘Now, when you come home on Sunday, let’s turn over a new leaf, shall we?’
She went upstairs, saying to Ellen, ‘I’m not in.’
‘She’s not in,’ said Ellen to George.
‘I’ll wait,’ said George, and sat down on the hard hall seat.
Ellen gave a big shrug as if she wanted to move the whole house and everyone in it off her shoulders; went off muttering to herself.
After about twenty minutes, George gave a big sigh and stood up.
He said, ‘Come on, old chap; we’ll talk about it at home.’
Lila, lying down on the sitting room couch, applying her atomiser, listened to PS’s story. She had expelled so much emotion since the night at the train that she felt nothing but an extreme weariness and, when trying to concentrate, as though she were reading very small print in a bad light. She closed her eyes, seeing the action speeded up in a comic film of Logan and Vanessa throwing custard pies at each other; Vanessa, dressed like a Mack Sennett cop, hitting PS with a rubber truncheon; PS locked in a bathroom throwing bottles; and comedy maids running in and out of doors, screaming.
She felt dulled and useless, as in her dreams, when seeing the house in flames, she found herself wading for help through treacle.
Wanting only to sleep, she thought that something must now be done.
‘Something must be done,’ she said to George, dazedly, over the washing up that night. ‘I must speak to Sam Hamilton.’
George said something about lawyers and money, and laughed.
‘The reason being—’ she said, and thought of so many reasons that she simply stood there with her hands in the comforting, warm, soapy water and let all the reasons run down the drain. It wasn’t only the matter of money (and that reminded her further that a decision must be made in a matter of days about taking in a lodger), but it was also a question of fighting. To fight anyone, let alone Vanessa, in her present state of mind seemed impossible. She wanted to forget the whole thing, go away to some quiet restful place in the mountains and be waited on hand and foot; above all not think about anything for a year. All the weekend she put off doing small things, moved in a trancelike state from room to room, misplacing scissors and leaving pots to boil over.
Sunday dragged by. At five o’clock she wen
t and called over the fence to PS, engaged with Winnie in some mysterious game on the Grindels’ veranda. Called the familiar, hated Sunday-afternoon cry of ‘Time to get ready.’
He came into her bedroom, where she was sitting on the bed darning stockings, and at once she knew what was going to happen.
‘I’m not going.’
He seemed to have grown half an inch taller very suddenly.
She put down her darning egg and automatically opened her arms, but PS took hold of the brass bedpost and hung on, ready to resist being picked up or moved anywhere again. She saw a giant implacability on the tight-fisted little face that made her feel suddenly the child, him the adult.
She said, ‘Now listen, pet—’
‘I’m not going.’
‘Just for this week—’
‘I’m not going back. I’m not going back!’
‘Listen, listen—’
‘I’m not.’
‘Just let me tell you something. Do you know what adoption is? It means we go to a court and we ask a judge to give you to us. Now, first thing tomorrow morning, George and I are going to Mr Hamilton, the lawyer, and ask him to take us to a judge—’
‘No.’
‘But, dearest, it’s the only way. Then you won’t ever have to go back.’
‘No.’
‘But, PS, if you don’t go back tonight it will make Vanessa very cross and then the judge might say we were wrong. But if you wait just a week—or two—just until the school holidays—’
‘I won’t go back.’
‘Just until we talk to Mr Hamilton.’
‘No.’
(No, he won’t. And I’ve run out of excuses. I can’t feed him any more fairy stories about it being just a ‘holiday’, just for a little while, because Miss Pile has a nicer school. He’s learned our tricks at last. He’s not a baby any more. Well, fancy that. He’s not a baby any more and I hadn’t noticed.)
She stood up. Her weariness was gone, dissolved in the hard bright light of decision. Let the worst happen, she was grateful beyond words that he had made up her mind for her.
‘All right,’ she said.
Then she said in a voice suddenly altered to suit an older child:
‘All right, but I think you should tell Vanessa yourself.’
‘No,’ he said, and then after a minute, ‘Why?’
‘Because she won’t believe me but I know she’ll believe you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you decided yourself. All by yourself.’
‘Then I won’t have to go back?’
‘No. But I want you to tell her yourself so she’ll know it’s not a fib I’m just making up, see?’
She pushed the hair out of his eyes and said, ‘You must show her that you’re not a little baby any more. That you made up your own mind about it, see?’
He nodded and Lila said, ‘We’ll go and ring up now.’
She went into the kitchen, found George asleep over the Sunday paper, hesitated a moment, then took three pennies out of the honey jar on the kitchen dresser.
Then up the street, being led rather than leading PS to Miss Gulf’s door. Muttering the usual apologies but with her heart beating wildly now, Lila got the number and then asked Ellen to get Vanessa to come to the phone as the matter was urgent and finally there was a cool, ‘Hello.’
She said, ‘Something’s happened. It’s not of my making, Vanessa. No, no, he’s all right, don’t be alarmed. He wants to speak to you himself.’
She handed him the phone and PS said, ‘I’m not coming back.’ Then he said, ‘I decided myself.’
The phone clucked. Clucked and clucked until Lila put out her hand to take it from him but again he seemed to decide what would be best and he hung up.
‘I told her,’ he said, and Lila, looking at him and seeing the frightening future crowded into that one moment, felt at the same time a remarkable joy.
THE LETTERS on the dirty windows spelled ELTNEG DNA and outside it people’s legs and feet went by in the rain and once a wet cat looked in the window through dna and down at them in the nasty-smelling office where he and Lila had been sitting for hours. The office was very cold even though there was a big fiery radiator with a wire grille over its red eye. The room smelled like school, smelled of ink and paper and old cupboards and Mr Gentle’s pipe. Mr Gentle was very young, about fourteen, with very stiff yellow hair cut short and flat like a nailbrush and a lot of yellow hair on his hands. Even Lila had seemed to think that Mr Gentle was very young because while they were sitting in Mr Hamilton’s office she had said, ‘He’s very young, Sam. I wish we had someone more experienced,’ and Mr Hamilton said something about the legal aid (or was it legal age?) and Lila had sighed and said, ‘Oh, well, beggars can’t be choosers but we’d feel so safe with you, Sam,’ and Mr Hamilton had said he had three divorces and a contested will but Mr Gentle would be just the ticket. Just the ticket, Mr Hamilton kept saying, and patted him on the head and said, ‘Well, PS, I knew your little mother and we’ll get you all fixed up, don’t you worry,’ and Mr Gentle had come running up and hustled them into this room which was so full of things it was almost like Vere’s only no fun. Then Mr Gentle had sat down behind a huge black desk covered with papers all tied up in pink string, and began smoking his pipe and asking hundreds of questions. They were all about the big house and ‘Auntie Nessie,’ as Mr Gentle kept calling Vanessa. She certainly wouldn’t like being called that, and he could see her now, very tall and straight, giving strict orders to Mr Gentle not to call her by that ‘appalling’ name and very likely sending Mr Gentle upstairs to bed.
Whenever the questions got hard and Lila tried to help him answer, Mr Gentle rapped on the desk and said, ‘Please, please! Let me hear it from the kiddie himself, Mrs Baines.’ Mr Gentle said that he knew all about kiddies, he had a kiddie of his own whose name was Bruce.
When it was Lila’s turn to answer questions, Mr Gentle gave him a glass ball to play with. Inside it was a little red house and when you shook the ball, a snowstorm whirled around the little house. Meanwhile, Mr Gentle wrote down everything Lila said, interrupting her a lot and sometimes cutting her short by saying, ‘That’s not relevant,’ and Lila would say, ‘Oh, I think it’s very important,’ and Mr Gentle would say, ‘We’ll see, we’ll see,’ or ‘We have a good case without going into that.’ The Case. It was all about the Case.
These days they talked about the Case all the time, and about going to the court. They were going to the court, Lila had told him, and there, if everything went all right, the judge would give him to Lila and George. He tried to picture the court and fancied that it might be like King Arthur’s. With bright-red and gold banners, glittering armour, swords and a great throne. He had bragged about it to Winnie, who had laughed at him, showing her teeth all black with liquorice, and said that it wouldn’t be like that at all and that probably he would go to jail, because that was what they did to people in courts. She knew! He would end up in Long Bay jail where they kept people chained up for years with only bread and water. Furious, he told her to go and boil her head. Whatever happened, whenever it was all over, then everything would be all right.
Just the same …
The Case!
He was thinking about the night Vanessa came in the car. The night after he refused to go back, just about tea time when the street lights were beginning to come on. He was in the front room when he saw the big car drive up and stop outside their gate. He ran to hide in the linen cupboard but Lila said, ‘Don’t be silly. She’s not going to take you away.’ He peeped while Lila opened the front door. There was a strange man standing there with very black hair and a very black suit who handed Lila a letter, which she read, leaning against the doorpost and puffing. Then she said, ‘The answer is no. Tell my sister he is not going back.’ The man then said that what Lila was doing was very serious and that Miss Scott was being very fair in giving her one last chance, but Lila kept saying no, no, and trying to close the f
ront door and the man said sternly that Lila had forty-eight hours in which to return the said infant or then Miss Scott would appeal to the Supreme Court for full guardianship. After that, they whispered for a long while and then Lila untied her apron and went out to the car with the man. He waited alone in the quiet house listening to the kitchen clock ticking and wishing George would come home right now and send Vanessa away. After a long time Lila came back. Her face was very white and she was swallowing all the time. She said, ‘Vanessa wants to speak to you for a minute,’ and when he pulled away, catching hold of a leg on the kitchen table, ready to hang on, she said, ‘Don’t be scared; I’m coming too, pet. Just tell her in front of the lawyer that you don’t want to go back.’ So, feeling a bit sick, his knees wobbling, he went out to the car with Lila. There were two little pink lights on inside the car and he could see Vanessa wearing a big hat sitting in the back with the man in the black suit. When he came to the open door of the big car, Vanessa leaned forward and smiled.
‘Hello,’ she said, and he said, ‘Hello.’
‘This isn’t like you, PS,’ said Vanessa. ‘This isn’t like you at all. What’s wrong?’
‘I’m not coming back,’ he said. ‘I decided.’
The man in the black suit said something quickly and quietly and Vanessa nodded. With her long white-gloved arm, she patted the seat next to her and said:
‘I tell you what, PS. Why don’t you sit down here with me and we’ll have a jolly nice talk about it.’
She seemed very pleasant, not angry at all. He felt suddenly a little sorry for having to be so cruel to her. She was smiling and the strange man was smiling. Even the chauffeur was smiling. They were all smiling at him. All he had to do was get in the car and explain nicely that this house was his home and it would all be over.
He put one foot up into the car but just as Vanessa reached out to help him, Lila screamed and pulled him back.
‘I saw you,’ Lila cried to the chauffeur, then to Vanessa, ‘I saw what you were going to do. What a filthy dirty trick.’
Careful, He Might Hear You Page 23