Children of the Archbishop (11 page)

“So the cruel Queen said to the poor woodman: ‘Take my
step-daughter out into the forest and kill her,'” Miss Wynne had recited in the same rolled-out, expressionless voice that she used when she was talking about capes and peninsulas, or Moses and Jonah, or simple addition. And Sweetie had shuddered. Because by then Sweetie had already been Snow White herself. From the very first description of her, Sweetie had known that she was the one that Miss Wynne was describing.

And Miss Wynne had asked someone to take her away and kill her. As she remembered it, she shuddered again. It was all too dreadful to think about. And none of it could have happened if only her mother hadn't died.

But by now Margaret was speaking, and Sweetie had to listen.

“We'll start with Nuts-in-May,” she was saying. “And I shall play for you.”

Margaret didn't play very fast. But she played very nicely, Sweetie thought. And, while she played, she talked.

“We don't want all the big ones on one side,” she told them. “If we have it like that, everyone will be pulled away.”

It seemed a very sensible sort of remark to Sweetie. So she went over and joined the little ones. She knew that, when it came to pulling, she could pull harder than anyone. But Margaret didn't seem to think so. She had stopped playing.

“You go back where you were, Sweetie,” she told her. “That only makes it worse. We want some
big
ones to go over.”

So Sweetie crossed the floor again, and went on thinking about Snow White's cruel step-mother. The only nice part in the whole story had been the bit about the dwarfs. Sweetie decided that she would like to have seven little men of her own to look after her. One of them could clean her shoes. And one of them could bath her. And one of them could bring her meals on a tray. And one of them could play the piano. And one of them …

But Margaret was speaking, and Sweetie couldn't go on thinking about the little men any longer.

“Wake up, Sweetie,” she was saying. “Bridget's waiting. She wants to pull you away.”

“Pull her away. Pull her away,” Sweetie thought. “But if I start pulling I shan't be able to go on thinking about the little men …”

“You're not trying, Sweetie,” Margaret told her. “You're day-dreaming.”

But by then it was too late. Bridget had pulled, and Sweetie
had gone over. So far as she was concerned, the game was finished. And she hadn't liked touching Bridget because her hands were so sticky. They had made Sweetie's hands sticky, too. She wiped them on the back of her dress.

It was the saddest of all games that came next. It was Poor Jenny. And Poor Jenny always made Sweetie want to cry, no matter how happy she was feeling. Because even before the music had started Sweetie wasn't just pretending: she
was
Poor Jenny.

And this time it was worse than usual. Because there really was something to be sad about. She kept remembering Snow White and how the cruel step-mother had tried to kill her with a poisoned comb. That was a dreadful thing to do. And it wasn't the end of it. For when the seven little men had taken the comb out of her hair, that awful step-mother of hers had given her a poisoned apple to eat.

“We'll make Sweetie play Poor Jenny,” Margaret said suddenly, “because she looks so serious to-day. Only she'll have to play harder than she played Nuts-in-May. She wasn't trying then.”

“I'll try now,” Sweetie promised.

And she meant it. She went into the middle of the room and knelt down on the floor, covering up her eyes with her hands. She was going to be the best Poor Jenny they had ever had. Then Margaret would be pleased with her again. But with her eyes shut it was Snow White that she began thinking about, not Poor Jenny. It was silly of the mirror to have gone on talking about Snow White, Sweetie decided. Because if the mirror hadn't said anything, the cruel step-mother wouldn't have got angry. Then Snow White could have lived for ever with her new friends.

No mother would behave like that, Sweetie was sure. Only step-mothers. And then Sweetie remembered that she hadn't got a mother herself. Nobody in the Hospital had got a mother. They weren't like other children. Other children went to school and then went home to their mother where they belonged. But the children in the Hospital were at school all the time. If a step-mother came inside the Hospital she could have poisoned them one by one without anybody minding. Already Sweetie could feel herself swelling and burning and growing thirsty.

She tried not to think about it. But it was no use. And the music only made it worse.
Bump, bump-y, bumpy, bump, bump
, Margaret was playing slowly and carefully. And all the time Sweetie was thinking about Snow White. Then, quite suddenly, Sweetie
decided that what she wanted was a mother. The thought had never occurred to her before. With all the children there were in the world there weren't enough mothers to go round: she could see that. But all the same she wanted one. She wanted a mother who would put her arms right round her and hold her close and run her fingers through her hair and tell her that nobody would ever send her away. At the thought that there wasn't anyone to do it, Sweetie began to cry. And once she had started she went on crying.

She was crying so hard that she didn't notice at first that the music had stopped. But, of course, when the
bump, bump-y, bumpy, bump, bump
stopped, the children all stopped, too. The first thing Sweetie realised was that everything was quiet. Quieter than she had ever known it before. And her own crying sounded suddenly very hard.

Then Margaret spoke.

“Are you really crying, Sweetie?” she asked. “Whatever's the matter?”

At that, Sweetie looked up. Because of her tears the room looked all misty and swimming. Even Margaret seemed wobbly. But Sweetie could see that she had got up from the piano and was coming over to her. And that was nice.

“I don't want to have a step-mother,” Sweetie began. “I want …”

But before she could say any more, Margaret had come over and put her arms around her. Sweetie could feel her running her fingers through her hair and telling her that she wouldn't ever have a step-mother, not ever.

All the other little girls were staring at her. But Sweetie didn't mind. She just stayed there, her arms close up against Margaret, still crying.

Marriage! Dame Eleanor had returned to the subject more than once. And apparently she was quite serious about it: a married Warden was better in her view than an unmarried
one. Part of Canon Mallow's trouble, she had repeated, had been that he was a bachelor.

And gradually Dr. Trump was beginning to see the whole subject in an entirely different light. Instead of regarding courtship as something merely cloying and frivolous, he saw it suddenly as noble and uplifting; a necessary and even agreeable first step to a state that was ordained and sacred. In short, he realised that it was his
duty
to get married.

But to whom? And by what means? As he stood beside his bedroom dressing-table, skilfully shaping his nails with the pair of curved scissors—when they were not in use he kept them for safety's sake jabbed into a cork that he had removed from an old medicine bottle—he turned over the various schemes that came into his mind. By joining a tennis club, for instance? He had noticed from his own observation of Church tennis clubs that the intervals between play were often distinctly amatory. But he didn't play tennis, and it seemed such a roundabout approach to matrimony to go out and buy a pair of rubber-soled shoes and a Slazenger. Or attending dances? There were studios in Baker Street that he had seen advertised which specialised in teaching the novice in six simple lessons. But could he be
sure
that he would become proficient enough for people not to notice what he was up to? He could not in his position afford to risk being pointed out as a wolf, a prowler. Or a foreign tour perhaps? The Swiss lakes or Holland in tulip time. The very nicest women visited that sort of place. His own Precentor at St. Neott's College, a man of the highest probity and attainments, he remembered, had met his own wife, a Miss Plimsoll, during an Anglican Travel Association fourteen-day all-in tour of the Scandinavian Capitals. Yes, there was certainly something in the idea of carrying the search abroad. Too much, in fact. There was the Channel. And ever since early childhood when he had once been taken down the Thames on a pleasure-steamer from Westminster to Greenwich, he had suffered from an unfortunate tendency to throw up at the mere sight of moving water.

As he reflected on this, he felt saddened. It seemed that matrimony was a charmed circle into which it was not merely difficult but almost impossible to enter. In consequence, he was moody, preoccupied and jumpy.

He was still in this state of gunpowder alertness to sex, as he emerged from his study that evening to make his rounds of the Hospital. He was strictly methodical in these matters, and to-day
was the turn for the Latymer block. Because it had been raining earlier—not Sid Harris's kind of rain, merely a flimsy, tissue-paper kind of stuff—he took his umbrella and put on a pair of rubber overshoes. Then, notebook in hand in case he wanted to jot down any little things, he set out.

The first entry was completed before he had gone a hundred yards from his lodging. There was a flower, a dandelion lying in the centre of the main pathway. There could be only one explanation—a child had dropped it. And then, while he was wondering whom to blame—the child for its carelessness, or the gardener for not tidying up after the children had passed—the solution, the simple dynamic solution occurred to him. Out came his notebook. “Close the main path to children,” was what he wrote. Drastic, perhaps. But after all, what would Dame Eleanor or Canon Larkin think of the place if they found dying dandelions littering the footways?

By the time he had reached the nursery wing, he had noted also that the lid of one of the water-butts needed screwing down so that the smaller children could not drown themselves, and that what appeared to be a portion of a home-made kite was caught up in one of the gutters of the Cranmer block. Then, notebook still in hand and pencil at the ready, he pushed open the frosted-glass doors of Latymer and looked about him. At first sight he took the place to be deserted. Not that this was surprising. It was nearly eight o'clock by now and it must have been a good two hours ago that the toddlers had all been bathed, dosed where necessary, and put to bed.

Everything was ideal, therefore, for a visit of inspection. And, tingling with suppressed excitement, he set to work. First, he tried two of the cupboards and, finding them locked as they should have been, he turned his attention to the rocking-horse. It was too large to be put away: he saw that. And apparently the makers had provided no cover for it. He was just turning over in his mind the feasibility of an instruction that the rocking mechanism should be securely padlocked when not in use, when he heard footsteps coming up the corridor on the far side. This surprised him because so far as he knew everyone was off duty by this time. Withdrawing quietly into the alcove behind the dolls' house—it was a large dolls' house, practically cottage-size, in fact—he remained there watching.

And he was not kept waiting. The door opened and the figure of a woman stood before him. Because it was dusk he could not
see her at all clearly. Indeed, he could make out no more than the general outlines, the darkness of the hair, the white blouse, the black skirt and stockings. All that he could see was that it was not Hospital uniform that she was wearing—that was broadly and distinctively striped, with a starched collar and cuffs. He could only assume, therefore, that one of the nurses was gallivanting around in her off-duty costume. Perhaps, after all, he was on to something.

But there was no attempt at secretiveness. When the new-comer had reached the centre of the hall, she casually put up her hand and pulled the dangling brass chain of the chandelier. There was a
plop
as the gas-mantle lit itself and then she stood there, clearly revealed and ignorant of the fact that she was being spied on. To his astonishment, Dr. Trump saw that it was Margaret.

What was more, as he peered round the dolls' house chimney stack, she struck him as being a rather agreeable kind of woman. She was tall, dark and … and dignified—no, that wasn't the right word—placid. She was the sort of woman whom he could imagine presiding gracefully over the nursery tea of a large family. Yes, that was it. What he saw in her was essentially maternal, strangely, movingly maternal … But he was allowing his thoughts to run away with him. What was she doing here at this time of night?

Apparently she was proposing to put up paper-chains. She had a whole bag of them with her and one by one she was taking out the things, red, blue, green, yellow, a veritable profusion of gay rubbish. Dr. Trump held his breath. Unperturbed and unself-conscious, she went about her work, fastening the strips on to the cupboard with drawing-pins, twining them through the chandelier—thereby, Dr. Trump noted, adding the danger of fire to damage to the woodwork—and then fastening them on to the cupboard opposite. She was quick and businesslike about it and as she climbed up on to a chair to secure one of the streamers. Dr. Trump noticed what a remarkably well-turned leg she had, But this was dreadful. Unless he was careful, he would find himself playing the part of Peeping Tom.

She had drawn something else out of her bag by now and was up on that chair again fixing it, whatever it was. Then, when she had got down, Dr. Trump was able to see it quite clearly. There hanging from the chandelier was a piece of coloured cardboard bearing the words “Happy Birthday, Sweetie.”

It was only the briefest of glimpses that he got of it because the
next moment Margaret, her work done, had pulled the little chain that extinguished the light.

The room was now in total darkness and Dr. Trump had to memorise the notes that he would otherwise have been making. There were quite a number of them, too: take down the card with Sweetie's name on it; remind Mrs. Gurnett that the child's
real
name, her hospital name, was Bertha; ask who had authorised the party.