Children of the Archbishop (60 page)

But as he got near, it was Sweetie who spoke first.

“Sorry, Ginger,” she said, “It's no good. I can't go no farther.”

“You're not bad, are you?” he asked anxiously.

Sweetie shook her head.

“Only tired,” she said. “Just tired—and my foot hurts.”

Ginger put his arm round her again.

“You'll feel better when you've had this,” he told her.

When they had gone another half-mile or so, and the village
looked quite small behind them, Ginger said that they could stop. There was a clump of trees just off the road and they made towards it. Compared with the bleakness of the moors in the dusk that was gathering round them, the shelter of the trees seemed friendly and comfortable. Ginger helped Sweetie pull her shoe off and then spread out the picnic that he had bought for them—there was the black pudding and the big chunk of fruit cake. He was keeping the bulls'-eyes for a surprise afterwards.

He divided the pudding carefully and then handed one portion to Sweetie. And it was certainly good; a bit on the rich side perhaps, but exactly what he was needing. He took another bite of it and felt better. When he looked up, however, he found that Sweetie wasn't eating. Hadn't so much as even taken a nibble to see if she liked it.

“Wozzermatter?” he asked.

“I feel sick,” she said. “I couldn't eat anything. I just don't want it.”

There was something in the way she said it that angered him. There he was, without a penny to his name because he had bought food for both of them, and all that Sweetie could think of to say was that she didn't want it. Just that. No thanks. Nothing.

“Well, if you don't, I don't either,” he said suddenly.

And, as he said it, he threw the whole of his portion away from him. Three-halfpence worth of black pudding went sailing out through the tree-trunks. He was bending down to throw the cake away, too, but Sweetie stopped him.

“Don't do that,” she said. “It's our breakfast.”

It was six o'clock by now and the night was closing in fast. They saw the moor change from grey to purple and now to black. And, as the light faded, the mist began to rise. It lay like smoke in the hollows already. And long damp fingers began reaching into the little wood where they were sitting. Sweetie shivered.

“You cold?” Ginger asked.

Sweetie nodded.

“I am rather,” she said.

“I'll come up nearer,” he told her. Then, after a pause, he spoke again. “Have a bulls'-eye?” he asked.

He was glad that she accepted because they were good bulls'-eyes. And sucking the bulls'-eyes made everything seem better. They became friendly again.

“D'you see that house we passed?” Sweetie asked.

Ginger nodded. He knew which one she meant.

“Must be nice, having a house like that,” she went on. “A house makes all the difference.” She hesitated. “Where do we go to-morrow?” she asked.

“Oh, some place,” Ginger answered. “Some place I can get a job. We'll be all right. I got that last job, didn't I? I can get another job any time I want it. Get one to-morrow, come to that. We'll be all right.”

There was a pause.

“Do you know where we are?” Sweetie asked.

“Yus,” was all that Ginger answered.

He was terse and not to be drawn on the subject: that much was obvious. And Sweetie did not press him. All the same, Ginger wished that she hadn't asked the question at all. He'd been wondering the same thing quite a lot lately. So far as he could see, they had come to the wrong part of England altogether. Nobody had ever told him that there was any bit of it like this—just fields without any hedges, and a road with telegraph poles beside it, and the mist. It might have been straight to the moon that this road was leading. Might almost have got there from the look of it. He began to wish that he had stayed in London. There were plenty of jobs in London. Compared with this, the whole place was full of them.

And more because he wanted to hear himself saying it than because he really believed what he was saying, he turned to Sweetie.

“It don't go on much longer like this,” he said. “There's more towns over the top of the hill. Lots er towns. If we don't like the first one we can move on. I'll git a job all right once we've got over that hill …”

It was growing colder every minute as he was talking. But he'd got more on than Sweetie. Underneath the overall, she seemed to be wearing hardly anything. He could feel her shivers right through him. Then suddenly he got up.

“‘Ere, you 'ave my jersey,” he told her.

But she wouldn't let him take it off. She was all right, she said. Even if he gave her the jersey she wouldn't wear it. So he sat down beside her again and put both arms round her. She seemed smaller than ever when he held her that way; smaller and somehow pitiable. Her hair was up against his face. It was soft, smooth kind of hair, and he started stroking it. He was sorry for her and, because he was sorry, he loved her. He had never known anyone quite so defenceless before.

“Cor,” he said. “It mustn't half be rotten bein' a girl.”

They didn't sleep much that night, because it was too cold for sleep. As soon as they moved away from each other even for a moment the coldness came striking at them. And they just lay there huddled against each other hoping that it would soon be morning. Their conversation was desultory and broken.

“Guess it'll be gittin' light again in a minute,” Ginger remarked at last. “Then we can start movin' on.”

That was about ten o'clock when he said it. And he found himself wishing that he really knew, that he had a watch—one of those good watches with luminous figures that you can read in the dark. But even without a watch he was still confident that at any moment dawn would be breaking and things getting warmer again.

“How long can people live without eating?”

It was Sweetie who had spoken and Ginger considered the point.

“About a munf,” he said. “Fink of people on rafts.”

There was a pause. Then Sweetie spoke again.

“Ginger,” she said.

“Yus?”

“If I die, would you promise to go on without me?”

“What makes yer think yer dyin'?”

“I don't think so. Only I might. People do die out in the cold, you know.”

“‘Tisn't cold enough for that,” Ginger answered. “At least, not yet it isn't.”

And then, when it must have been nearly midnight, Sweetie asked another of those questions that Ginger would rather not have had put to him.

“Suppose you don't get a job?” she asked. “Suppose neither of us gets a job, what are you going to do then?”

“I've told yer I shall get a job.”

“But supposing you don't.”

“I'll go on looking.”

“You can't go on looking if you haven't had any food.”

“I'll steal some food.”

Sweetie paused. She'd thought about stealing, and she'd wondered if it had occurred to Ginger, too.

“But suppose you can't, suppose it's all locked up,” she went on. “We'd have to stop then. We'd have to tell a policeman who we are.”

Ginger moved away from her.

“I shan't never do that,” he said fiercely. “I'd rather be dead than git caught.”

“Do you mean kill ourselves?” Sweetie asked.

The question put directly to Ginger startled him. He hadn't thought of it like that. But he didn't want to admit that there was anything that he hadn't considered. And, in any case, he supposed that killing yourself quickly would be better than slowly starving to death in some awful cold place like this one. So he shrugged his shoulders to show that he was prepared for everything.

“Yus,” he said simply.

He had imagined that this would settle it, would frighten Sweetie off asking any more of her silly questions. But it didn't.

“How?” she asked.

And that really did irritate him. He'd just been planning to run away. Not to commit suicide.

“Oh, jump in a river or somefink,” he said. “Now you shut up.”

Sweetie could tell from his tone of voice that she had offended him.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I only wanted to know.”

That pacified him, and he moved in closer again.

“An' go er sleep,” he told her. “S'nearly morning any'ow. Can't be more'n half an hour now. Guess it's gettin' lighter already.”

It was light when he awoke again and Sweetie had spread her coat over him.

That was Sweetie's and Ginger's second night in the open. And it was their third night away from the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital.

In the course of a year quite a lot of children are missing for a single night. They drop off to sleep under a lilac bush in a public park, or slip round to auntie without telling mum, or even buy a platform ticket and lock themselves in the lavatory until the train reaches Glasgow. One night is nothing; you can't expect the police force to turn itself upside down just because a night's domestic arrangements have been a bit upset. But two nights' absence is serious. It means that the thing has been planned, calculated, fixed up in advance possibly: in short, it is thoroughly unchildish. Either that, or something bad has happened. And to be missing for three days means that the wheels start turning. All sorts of things happen—telephone calls, divisional conferences, photographs in the
Police Gazette
, door-to-door inquiries, newspaper paragraphs, appeals on the wireless.

And though Sweetie and Ginger woke, stiff and still shivery, to a peaceful October morning with a gentle mellow hush hanging over the whole landscape, that was only how it looked at first glance. In reality, it was a field day for the County Constabulary. The police were out hunting in real earnest by now.

Breakfast for Sweetie and Ginger didn't amount to much. And that was because the fruit cake had gone soggy in the night. After the bit of trouble about the black pudding, Ginger had forgotten to put the fruit cake back inside the bag again, and the dew had got at it. It was like a flat, wet sponge. They didn't break bits off: they scooped.

But having nothing to drink was the bad part. The Archbishop Bodkin seniors all had tea for breakfast—great amber rivers of it, poured out of big enamel jugs with the milk and sugar all ready mixed up with it. Even Miss Britt hadn't been able to put an end to that. And Sweetie and Ginger both remembered it as they sat there pecking at their handful of damp cake crumbs.

“Git a drink when we come to a river,” Ginger observed at last. “When we come to a river we'll git a drink.”

“I want one,” Sweetie told him. “That's why I couldn't eat last night.”

“Well, let's git goin',” Ginger said firmly. “Got to git over them hills.”

But he had not reckoned on Sweetie's heel'. She had walked on it for one day too many. And the heel was now red and angry-looking. Even with both of them pushing together they couldn't get it into the shoe. And, in the end, they had to stop trying because the pain of it made Sweetie feel sick again.

That beat Ginger. He squatted down on his haunches, wondering what to do. And finally it was Sweetie, not Ginger, who decided. She was wearing an Archbishop Bodkin petticoat and she tore a long strip off it. Then she made a bandage out of it. And finally, just to make sure that it didn't come off when she walked, she tied the two ends together round her ankle.

“We can go on now,” she said.

Ginger looked at the bandage suspiciously.

“People'll notice,” he said.

But Sweetie only shook her head.

“No, they won't,” she said. “If anyone asks, I'll say I lost it. People do lose their shoes, because I've seen them.”

All the same, it was slow going. Ginger made Sweetie keep to the grass verge where her feet wouldn't show up so much. And all the time they were walking Ginger was thinking.

“Knew I didn't oughterer let 'er come wiv me. Gotter stealer pairer girls' shoes now. Knew I didn't oughterer let 'er …”

It broke in on his thoughts when Sweetie spoke to him.

“Did you mean what you said last night about not letting the police catch us?” she asked.

“ 'Course I meant it,” Ginger answered. “Wot you fink?”

“I only wondered.”

“If the police git me, they won't git me alive,” Ginger assured her. “I'm not that kind.”

Having made the remark, he forgot all about it. There was no particular purpose in it. It was simply that Ginger's sense of the dramatic told him that something of the sort was expected of him. And, as a matter of fact, it was strangely reassuring, merely uttering such words. They satisfied some deep male instinct for sheer boastfulness.

And Sweetie seemed to be impressed.

“I won't forget,” she said. “I won't let you down.”

“That's okay,” Ginger told her.

When they had gone some distance they had to leave the verge and take to the road itself. Down the slope of the hill in front of them was parked a green Post Office van, and there was a man perched on the top of a near-by telegraph pole like a monkey up a coconut palm. Ginger paused. That was just what he wanted to avoid, having to go past someone. But the man up the telegraph pole seemed busy enough. He was bending over, concentrated on his work. It must have been windy up there, too. Ginger could see that the man had a leather strap round his waist but, even so, he swayed on his perch every time a gust blew. That decided Ginger.

“If he's doin' his job an' he's gittin' blown about, he won't 'ave time to bother about us,” Ginger calculated.

And, turning to Sweetie, he said:

“Come on, we ain't gittin' nowhere.”

“I'm coming as fast as I can,” she said.

But the wind was against them. It was coming up the hill at them like little fists.