Children of the Archbishop (68 page)

“She doesn't love me any more,” she began saying. “Something's happened to her. She doesn't.”

It was the Matron's voice that startled her.

“There now,” she said as she closed up the heavy black register with Sweetie's name in it. “If we get the signatures witnessed, I think that's everything.” She patted Sweetie's hand. “Your tooth-brush and toilet things are in the little bag. And you can keep the magazine, dear, I'll give it to you.”

She turned to Margaret. “I can see that Sweetie's going to be very happy with you,” she went on in her cold, clear, Miss Britt-ish kind of voice. “You are, aren't you, Sweetie dear?”

Then back to Margaret again before Sweetie could answer.

“And, don't forget we want to hear from you once a week. Just for the first six months that is. Afterwards, once a month will be plenty. A couple of lines will be sufficient—just to say how our little friend is doing.”

Finally she turned to Sweetie once more. Her arm, Margaret noticed, went around Sweetie's shoulders again as though it were accustomed to rest there.

“And remember everything I've said,” she told her. “You don't want to be a disappointment to us, do you?”

The green gates had closed behind them, and they were alone together at last. Margaret was too happy to speak now: she was
afraid that, if she said anything, Sweetie would know that she was crying. Crying from sheer happiness at having got Sweetie back again.

All the same, the ride back was not how she had imagined it. Unthinkable as it may seem, they quarrelled. It happened quite suddenly. At one moment there was Sweetie snuggled up against her, holding Margaret's hand in hers. And then, with the other, Sweetie had produced something from her coat-pocket.

“Look,” she said. “One of the other girls gave it me. It's a lip-stick.”

She was obviously proud of it. It was a treasure, a symbol. That was why it was so unforgivable when Margaret snatched it from her. And, having snatched it, she did worse. Pulling down the window of the car, she threw the lip-stick out into the street that was gliding past them.

“You're not to use lip-stick,” she said. “You're too young.”

Sweetie turned on her.

“Why can't you stop bossing me?” she asked. “I didn't ask you to come here. And I'm going to use lip-stick. As soon as I've got some money the first thing I'm going to buy is a lip-stick.”

But Margaret was angry too, by then.

“Lip-sticks are wrong,” she said. “D'you hear me, they're wrong. You're not never to use them. At any rate, not until I say so. Not until you're old enough to understand.”

There was silence for a while. For so long, in fact, that Margaret was beginning to be afraid. She thrust out her hand towards Sweetie. But it was no use. Sweetie avoided her. She remained there, her body rigid, her head turned away, staring resentfully out of the window. Margaret could see the cold sullen face reflected in the glass.

“She's tired, that's what's the matter with her,” she told herself. “And I ought to have been nicer. It's all my fault. I ought to have waited until to-morrow.”

And she began to tell Sweetie about the new life that she was going to lead; about the bedroom that had been got ready for her—Dame Eleanor had decided finally on the little side room in the west wing, because the staircase led straight up past Margaret's own door.

“… and it's going to be lovely,” she said. “You won't never”—“won't ever” she corrected herself—“have to wear uniform no more. And we'll find you some friends of your own age, so you won't be lonely. And we'll go out walks together, and in
the evenings if Dame Eleanor's settled we can just sit together. My bedroom's just like a sitting-room, it is really. And you can come in there …”

Sweetie's hand was in hers by now. It was warm and soft and confiding.

“I'm sorry I was cross just now,” she said. Margaret squeezed her hand.

“That's all right,” she said. “It's just that I don't want Dame Eleanor to think that you're one of the wrong sort. I want her to like you.”

Sweetie moved close. She had been edging imperceptibly nearer to Margaret all the time and was leaning right against her now.

“Why's she doing all this for me?” Sweetie asked.

Margaret paused.

“Because she's good,” Margaret answered. “She likes helping people. Don't you ever forget how good she is. It doesn't matter how cross she is on top; she's good underneath and that's all that matters. Good the whole way through, and just you remember it.”

“I'll remember,” Sweetie promised.

The car had reached Putney Common by now. Sweetie had been there nature-walking. It was pleasant, this, like coming home again. Then a shadow passed across her face.

“Where's Ginger?” she asked.

As a matter of fact, Ginger was miles away; right off the map somewhere at a farm school in Norfolk. And this was because the law, having summed him up, took a pretty serious view of Ginger. He had the twin charges of breaking open and larceny against him; and, as a potential criminal and menace to society, he was regarded as altogether too unstable for ordinary probation.

It was really Canon Mallow whom he had to thank for being sent to the farm school. Only he didn't know it. And Canon Mallow didn't know it either. Indeed, when the detective-sergeant came to see Canon Mallow and asked such a lot of questions about Ginger, he felt that he could hardly have given the boy a better all-round character. But what the detective-sergeant seemed to be chiefly interested in was a little matter of half a crown that he was supposed to have given Ginger. And here, if only the
detective-sergeant had explained things properly, or if he had taken the trouble to make Canon Mallow realise that everything depended on whether Ginger had really believed that the half-crown was his or not, Canon Mallow's answer might have been different.

As it was, the detective-sergeant asked the plain question: Had Canon Mallow ever given Ginger a half-crown? And he received the plain answer: “No.”

But can you wonder? Past seventy, the mind plays all kinds of tricks. Whole episodes are erased sometimes. And, with not so much as a single clue to help him, Canon Mallow could not remember a thing. Simply not a thing.

Towards the end of the interview he did, admittedly, get the impression that perhaps he
ought
to have remembered, that perhaps he was disappointing the detective-sergeant, and he tried to make amends for it.

“I
may
have given the boy a half-crown,” he said. “One can't be sure, can one? It's so long ago. But it's rather a large sum, half a crown, isn't it? If it had been sixpence or a shilling, I could have understood it. Of course, if he says so, I suppose I must have done. But I wonder why. I don't usually go about giving half-crowns away. At least not that I'm aware of. But I can't be certain that I didn't you know. It's only that I would probably have remembered it.”

In the face of evidence such as that—and Canon Mallow repeated it all in Court in much the same terms until the Children's Magistrate had thanked him politely and invited him to stand down—it was decided that Ginger really had stolen the money. That he was a thief. And more than a thief—a burglar into the bargain. It was that bit about forcing the padlock with the poker that counted most against him. And with such a record, nothing less than a couple of years of institution life could be regarded as really tackling the problem.

That was how it was that Ginger came to be travelling up to Norfolk by train, in company with an elderly probation officer, rather like a dubious and despondent sheep, who kept one eye trained suspiciously on danger spots such as Exits and lock-up lavatories.

Ginger wasn't actually handcuffed; but that was the feeling. And he felt pretty rotten about things, just sitting there in the compartment with the jumpy old sheep edged up close on the seat beside him. The future at that moment just didn't seem worth living for. Even to have gone into a butcher's shop would have
been better than having to go back to school again. And of all the barmy kinds of school, a farm school seemed to Ginger just about the barmiest of the lot of them.

But twenty-four hours later, he wouldn't have been anywhere else on earth. It wasn't the situation—bang in the centre of some of the flattest, dullest-looking country in the whole of England. It wasn't the house—a large, flat-faced sort of mansion like a … a … a, yes that was it: like a school. It wasn't the Principal, a youngish curly-haired enthusiast, who embarrassed Ginger by linking arms with him straight away just to make him feel at home. It wasn't the food; or the games; or the companionship; or the animals. It was the tractors.

There were two of them, both Fordsons. One was practically new, with the gloss still on the paintwork; a veritable Beau Brummell among tractors. But it was the other one, ancient, discoloured, honourably-scarred, that tugged at Ginger's heart. And this was because its clutch had been taken down. Drawn up in the centre of the repair-workshop, the tractor stood there, degutted, its entrails spread neatly around it on the floor. And an instructor-mechanic was lecturing on the various parts, holding them out at arm's length as he did so, like a coroner carrying out rather an interesting post-mortem in public.

Ginger was right at the back for the first session. After the lunch break, however, he managed to work himself into the front row. And by tea-time he had been appointed assistant-demonstrator, and was allowed to pass the bits and pieces. He went to bed that night in the happy consciousness of a good day entirely well-spent. There had been virtue in it, and he fell asleep with his mind full of dry-plates and grease-washers and counter springs and Ferodo-facings.

His past life—dull, trivial and unrewardful, it now seemed in retrospect—slid from him. He forgot about the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital; and the reservoir in which he had so nearly drowned himself; and the Arkleydale Institution and the Children's Court; and all the rest of it. First hand acquaintance with a reciprocating rocker-arm had temporarily banished all other memories.

Even the memory of Sweetie herself had slipped quietly away in the midst of them.

Well, there you are: with Canon Mallow back at the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital where we first met him; and Ginger getting along nicely at the Farm School; and Sweetie and Margaret together again; and Dame Eleanor herself made thoroughly comfortable once more, the outlines of the pattern are beginning to appear. There is a certain discernible shape, even a shapeliness.

All lives, and indeed all collections of lives, are like that. If you withdraw far enough to get an angel's-eye view of things, as it were, and see the span of time as a whole, there is always the perfect and final pattern waiting somewhere. It may be something quite tiny—covering only a few years or months or weeks even; a mere design in miniature set inside the big untidy scribble 01 existence. The trouble is that so many people rush at it, kidding themselves that they have studied the whole plan when they have really only observed one small part of it. Then, at best, what emerges is a botch-up, lop-sided affair, a sort of badly-made picture frame that ten to one contains the wrong portrait altogether.

Indeed, that is just the way it would be if the Archbishop Bodkin chronicles were chopped-off somewhere round about at this point. The shape would be there all right. But, as it happens, it would be the wrong shape. It would be meaningless and, in places, downright misleading. To see the whole thing properly, to get the placid, uncrowded view to which the angels are accustomed, there is nothing for it but to withdraw still farther. Take in about another four years of it, in fact. And, even then, it is only somewhere towards the end where something happens to Sweetie and something else to Dame Eleanor, that the true picture jumps up at us.

It may be that the whole pattern is really a jig-saw. The little chunky bits have gradually been assembling themselves through the years—ever since 1920, in fact, when Sergeant Chiswick carried Sweetie in off the doorstep. But he didn't know then that it wouldn't be until nearly eighteen years later—with beer gone up ninepence and another world war just round the corner—that the final little
twiddly bit, the key-piece itself, would be slotted into place and the portrait in the frame would be complete. Didn't, for that matter, know even whose portrait it was going to be, whether it was to be Sweetie's or Ginger's or Canon Mallow's or Dr. Trump's or Margaret's or Dame Eleanor's.

But it would not have worried him. For Sergeant Chiswick was never the thinking kind. And, in any case, by the time 1938 came along Sergeant Chiswick had backed his last loser and dropped quietly out of the pattern altogether.

Meanwhile, the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital was in a state of confusion.

Dame Eleanor had been ordered by her doctor to rest and, with Margaret there to look after her, she was prepared this time to obey his orders. In consequence, it was Canon Larkin who, pro tern., presided at meetings. A born administrator, with a keen actuarial sense, he naturally spent a great deal of his time in discussing the nature of the Hospital's financial settlement with regard to Dr. Trump. How long should full pay continue? he asked. What limit should be placed upon the half-pay period? Did sick leave count for purposes of pension? Was the Warden's Lodging a perquisite or an emolument? He was a great man for thoroughness and detail, and he succeeded finally in bewildering even himself. In the result, Dr. Trump continued to receive his full cheque every month and Canon Mallow, who was unable to get a word in edgeways, even when it was about Hospital business, was left to direct the Bodkin fortunes single-handed.

And in small ways he managed to make his presence felt. Within the first month he got all the keep-off-the-grass notices removed; and, by Christmas he had engaged a platoon of robust, old women to do the rough cleaning and so save the girls—some of whom were quite small Canon Mallow had noticed—from having to carry such heavy buckets about.