Another clutch of children barrel through from the drawing-room, skid across the floor, launch themselves beneath the table and emerge disappointed. They don’t even look at her. Adults, in a child’s world, only really exist when they are providing the entertainment or putting a stop to it. All of them are in some form of fancy dress, she notices, though how much has come from the attic trunk and how much is their normal everyday clothing, she couldn’t say. She’s so used to the sight of seven-years-olds with belly-button rings and platform shoes that nothing much seems odd to her these days. Kieran wanted to get Yasmin’s ears pierced the week they came home from the hospital and she had a bruise on her shoulder for weeks that proved she’d said no. Ear-piercing: the Chav equivalent of circumcision. I always wanted more for her than that.
They throw back the curtains, look behind them and then, with a cursory hello, they trot on to the stairs and disappear. That’s one good hiding place I’ve picked there, she thinks. I hope it’s not too good: that they don’t just get bored and wander off and leave Yas lying there all afternoon.
She can’t believe how powerfully this lipstick has adhered. Bridget squirts another dose of window cleaner onto the glass, looks at her misted reflection and sets to polishing.
A movement behind her makes her jump. A small figure, emerging silently from the anteroom. She hasn’t heard anyone go in there. She turns, looks.
A small girl. Not one she recognises. Must be one of the village kids: probably one they picked up in the playground because she certainly doesn’t have the pink-cheeked, vitamin-fed, nightly-bathed look of the Aykroyd friends’ spawn. This one is sort of greyish-yellow, if she’s anything: hollow cheeks and big dark patches round the eyes, and arms bleached like flotsam. Someone’s given her a bad home haircut with the kitchen scissors, by the look of it. And dressed her from Oxfam.
“Where on earth did you come from?” she asks.
The girl stops dead in the doorway and stares at Bridget as though – a small shiver of shock runs through her – she hates her.
She's got a nasty little mouth. Ill-tempered, judgemental.
“Are you looking for Yasmin?”
The child folds her arms and narrows her eyes. Juts her jaw and gives Bridget a look of pure poison.
“It wasn’t me,” she says. “I didn’t bloody do it.”
Chapter Nineteen
She doesn’t wait for the others. They wouldn’t wait for her – and anyway, she is too happy. She doesn't want them bursting her bubble. This is my day, she thinks. My day. Today, I won a prize, and nobody’s ever given me a prize before.
Fighting her way through the front door, jostled by end-of-term schoolmates eager to start the long summer holiday, she is momentarily dazzled by the brightness of the light. The sun, as they sat cross-legged while the hour-after-hour of assembly – even a sixty-pupil school can drag prizegiving out 'til lunchtime – crawled past, has burst through the clouds and bathes the fields around Meneglos in gold.
I won, she thinks. I won a prize. Clutches her handwritten certificate against her chest as she wanders away from the group. No-one notices her go. No-one wants her to stay. There's a game of rounders starting up on the common and no-one will want her on their team. She knows without having to put herself through the humiliation of the selection process. But Lily doesn't care. She doesn't care. She’s been the outsider all her life; she barely notices any more.
They can’t take it away from me. That’s one thing they can’t take away. I’m the best drawer in the whole school and no-one can take that away.
Suddenly she sees a world of possibility. I can be an artist. When I grow up. People pay money for that. Good money. Biddy Blakemore’s always going on about how much her precious paintings are worth, and mine are much better. At least my children look like children. Hers look like tiny little grownups with great big pumpkin heads stuck on top. Like dwarves. Mine look like they can move. Mrs Carlyon said so. In front of the whole school. She said I was the best painter she’d ever taught and they can never take that away from me.
Her cheek muscles, unused to smiling, ache slightly as she walks up the lane. There are flowers on the hedges – Lily never saw a hedge in Portsmouth, never even made it to the clipped-and-tonsured suburbs, so she doesn’t know that the Cornish hedge, with its banks and moss-covered stone walls, is not a hedge as the rest of the country knows it – and she suddenly notices their beauty for the first time in her life.
I’ll practice all summer, she thinks. Someone will let me do a job for them, earn enough to buy some pencils and some paper, and then I’ll spend the whole summer… maybe Tessa will let me use hers, if I ask her. If I’m nice. She’s got more than she needs. She can’t want all those: she never uses them. I’ll go everywhere. The lanes and the hedges and the moor and down by the stream, and I’ll draw it all. All these colours. That big tree in the garden, the one with the swing hanging off it. It looks black when you first look at it, but when you look some more, it’s full of colours: black and blue and green, and the trunk’s not brown, like little kids draw it: it’s grey and silver, and there’s yellow as well: great stripes of it, all down one side. And other people don’t notice these things, but I do, and that’s why I’m better than them.
She pauses at the junction where the Menglos road crosses the St Mabyn road, turns, on the far side, into the unmetalled track that runs down through arable fields to Rospetroc. The wheat is knee-high. It ripples in the breeze as she looks down at her destination. Lily takes a moment to untie the ribbon that binds her certificate, to unfurl it and look once again at the proof of her triumph. She can barely read it – Mrs Carlyon says her reading’s a disgrace – but she can make out the words “First Prize” copper-plated across the top, inside the scrolled margin which runs all the way round, and her own name, written carefully in India ink. Lily Rickett. That’s me. Prizewinner Lily Rickett.
And I’ll get good enough, and the war will finish next year, and I can slip away while no-one’s looking. I’ll go a long, long way away, where no-one knows me, and I’ll find a little cottage somewhere, in the middle of the country where no-one wants to live, and I’ll draw and draw and paint and paint and paint, and people will come. They’ll come. They’ll hear about me and they’ll come and they’ll see my pictures and they’ll give me money and it won’t be like the old days. And I’ll be famous, and then they’ll all want to know me. And when I’m rich, I’ll go back. I’ll go back to Portsmouth and I’ll find my mum, and I’ll show her. I’ll show her my good clothes and my car and my shoes, and she probably won’t even know who I am till I tell her. And she’ll be sitting there in the pub, and I’ll just walk in and…
She rolls it back up with greater care than she has ever treated any other possession, reties the ribbon, walks on. A few feet onto the track, she kicks off her shoes – the holes in the soles make them more uncomfortable, strangely, than walking barefoot – and steps onto the verge.
Just think. They’ll all be sorry they didn't make friends with me then. They’ll say: I lived with her once. With Lily Rickett, the famous artist. We were evacuated together during the bombing. I wish I’d been nicer to her. I saw her in the street the other day, and she didn’t even know who I was. Ted and Pearl and Vera and Geoffrey: think they’re a cut above, won’t talk to me, Pearl crying all the time and Geoffrey telling everyone they’ll catch things off me. And I’ll see him in the street one day, and he’ll want to know me then. And I’ll just look at him, and I’ll toss my head, and I’ll say: no. I don’t remember you. Who did you say you was, again?
The grass is soft, prickly, the earth beneath damp from last night's rain. I like the smell here, she thinks. Not like Portsmouth. No coal-fires or glue works or spilled fuel. No smell of mushrooms in the bedroom or shit in the yard. No fags or port-and-lemon as she comes in with whoever, turfs me out of my nice warm bed so she can make noises like an animal, and that smell when she lets me back in: salt and old milk and sweat…
Lily stops and sups the air. Smells are colours to her: the ones on this hillside green and brown and gold, with something soft and purple drifting on the breeze from the moor. She digs a toe into the soft broken surface of a molehill, feels a tiny shiver of pleasure at the cool, slimy, crumbled texture. And suddenly she has a thought she doesn't remember having had before. It catches her by surprise, shocks her.
I could be happy.
The thought disturbs her, thrills her at the same time, the way early moments of sexual attraction take the young. She is rooted to the spot, frozen with fear and exhilaration. She looks wildly around her, as though she is afraid that someone might have overheard the thought.
My God, I could be happy.
It's too much. Too much for her untrained mind.
Lily takes to her heels, bolts down the hill. But as she runs, she feels the breeze, feels the earth beneath her feet, feels the world reel on its axis, and the surge returns.
I could be happy. It could all be all right. I could be…
Hugh is home. She's caught unawares, hasn't expected him. Of course he's home. Eton breaks up just like other schools, and the long summer holidays would justify the search for the space on a train.
He is standing in the dining room, by the dresser, with a cricket bat in his hand. He has his back to her, but by the time, running in from the sunlight, she realises he is there, shrieks to a halt and tries to back out, it is too late. He has heard her. Starts, whips round with a look on his face made up of fear, guilt and defiance. And when he sees who has caught him, his expression changes.
Oh God, she thinks. He's just the same.
She backs away, tries to make her way toward the door and the possibility of escape.
“Oh,” he says. “You're still here, then.”
Lily doesn't answer. Just looks at his face, at the gloat that has started to play across it.
“If you tell,” he says, “you'll regret it.”
“I won't tell,” she says reflexively. And then she sees what she's not supposed to tell about. On the floor by his feet lies a cricket ball – hard, scuffed oxblood leather, a fray in the string which binds it – and the shards of half a dozen figurines. The stern features of the Duke of Wellington stare up at her, the baleful half-face of Queen Victoria, the tragic simper of Nell Gwynn, orange still gripped in her graceful hand, basket lying three feet away.
And then she sees something else pass across his face. A new thought. And then a gleeful decision.
Oh, God. I'm in for it now.
“Mummy's going to be very, very angry,” he says.
Again, she doesn't say anything.
He steps toward her. “It would be better for you,” he says, “if you just owned up straight away. I know how her mind works. She'll be furious, of course, but what she really can't stand is a liar.”
He steps toward her, and she closes her eyes.
Chapter Twenty
They're late. They're already singing As Shepherds Watched Their Flocks. So much for relaxed country timings. Nothing in London starts less than ten minutes late, to allow for the tube.
They're all going to look at us.
She pauses beneath the lych-gate, almost turns back. Then she thinks: no, this is right. I'm going to be part of this community if it kills me. Hurries, clutching Yasmin's hand, up the graveyard path.
Yasmin looks up at the tower, dark and squat and Saxon, with open mouth. “Why are we going here, again?”
It's church,” says Bridget. “It's what people do at Christmas in the country. They go to church.”
Damn Lambeth Council. No Little Baby Jesus in its schools for fear of offending the minorities. I should have thought about it before now, instead of worrying about how to afford the presents. She won't even know any of the songs. I barely remember any myself.
“So what do you do in Church, then?”
“You pray. Talk to God. And sing. And then everyone listens to the man with the dress on when he gives you a lecture about how no-one remembers the meaning of Christmas.”
“What if I don't know the words?”
“Doesn't matter,” says Bridget. “Just mouth them. And, look –”
She squats down just outside the door, looks her daughter in the eye. “All you have to do is be as quiet as possible, and stand up and sit down when everyone else does. And if you're not sure what to do next, just close your eyes and clutch your hands together like this.”
“Oh right!” says Yasmin. “Like here's the church, here's the steeple… I get it!”
“Yuh, that's right. But just stick with the “church” bit till I nudge you.”
“Okay,” says Yasmin. Holds still while Bridget smoothes her hair down and checks her own hemline.
“All glory be to God on high, And to the Earth be peace,” sing the congregation. Blast. I'm sure that's the last verse.
“Christmas is weird in the country,” she says.
“I know,” says Bridget. “People have all sorts of different ways of doing things. That's why they call it multicultural.”
“Hmm,” says Yasmin.
They push open the door. The pine and candlewax and damp stone smell fills her nostrils, half-forgotten but familiar from her own childhood. Like riding a bike, she thinks. I'll remember how to do this.
“Begin and never cease…”
“In the country,” says Yasmin in a loudly into the post-hymn pause, “don't they do presents, like at real Christmas?”
A hundred pairs of eyes fix upon them. Sunday-best wrapped in anoraks. Old ladies down the front in hats. Sulking teenagers. Respectability emanating from every pore. Yasmin looks up at her mother, enquiringly. “Don't they believe in Santa Claus?” she asks.
“She's a one, that kid of yours.”
“Don't,” says Bridget. Feels herself flush again at the memory.
“Never mind,” says Chris Kirkland. “That's what we have them for, isn't it? To remind us how fragile dignity is?”
“Oh, God,” says Bridget. “What a way to introduce ourselves.”
“Don't worry about it. Better to stand out than have no-one know you're there.”
“What are they going to think? Can't even teach my child the basics of Christianity.”
Chris laughs. Snags a couple of glasses of sherry from the cloth-covered trestle table that stands against the wall. Hands her one. “I don't know what sort of place you think you've come into, but I should think it's exactly like the rest of the country. Most of these people don't see the inside of a church from one year's end to the next. I shouldn't think the congregation's bigger than twenty on a normal Sunday. Rest of them are down the pub, or watching the telly. Anyway. Bottoms up.”
“Cheers,” says Bridget. “Happy Christmas.”
“Yes, happy Christmas. What are you doing to celebrate?”
“Oh, it's just us. We'll be doing it quietly, in my kitchen. House is full of renters.”
“Ah yes. Stella Aykroyd and her lot. Don't suppose we'll be seeing them down the church in a hurry.”
Bridget laughs.
“So you've not got family coming, or anything?” asks Chris.
Bridget looks over at her daughter, who has found a couple of playmates and is busy rearranging the nativity scene in the corner. It has, she notices, a Celtic cross and a small fleet of fishing boats included, and the countryside surrounding the stable is surprisingly green. Camels on Bodmin Moor. No odder than snow in Bethlehem, really.
“No,” she says vaguely. “No family.”
Then she realises that she's probably causing more curiosity by being vague than being talkative. “No,” she says hastily. “My Mum and Dad died in a car crash when I was seventeen and I didn't have any brothers or sisters.”
Chris assumes the customary expression of neutral sympathy. “I'm sorry to hear that.”
Bridget shakes her head. “It was a long time ago. Half a lifetime.”
“All the same.”
She can tell that this isn't go
ing to be enough. “And I split up with her father quite soon after she was born,” she explains. “We don't really have any contact any more.”
“Ah,” says Chris. “You'll find there's a few like that in this village. You'll be in good company. Mince pie.”
“Yes,” says Bridget.
“Don't really like them without brandy butter myself. Not with short pastry, anyway.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Vicar's wife makes them, though, so you have to show willing.”
“Absolutely.”
They bite, and chew. The pies are heavy, like someone's made them from Potty Putty, and contain little more than a half-teaspoon of filling. Chris splutters a few crumbs as she begins to speak again. “So have you met anybody much yet, then?”
“Not really. Haven't had much chance. Mrs Varco. You. Mrs Walker.”
“All all right with the school?”
“Yes. She's starting in the New Year.”
“Good. She'll be fine there.”
“I hope so. I worry, you know, that she'll be behind everyone. You know. London schools…”
“Well, given that she'll be in with three kids with webbed toes that I know of,” says Chris, “I wouldn't be too concerned. She's as bright as a button, that one.”
“Thank you,”
“Don't mention it.”
A woman in navy-blue sackcloth approaches. She wields a cup of tea with its saucer. “Merry Christmas,” she says.
“Merry Christmas, Geraldine.”
“All well?”
“Delicious. Thank you. Must have taken you ages.”
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