No Peace for Amelia (2 page)

T
he garden was so small, you got the feeling that if you leant out of the scullery window and stood on tippy-toes and breathed in and stretched and stretched, you might just be able to touch the back wall with the very tip of your longest finger.

Not that Mary Ann had the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort. She was far too busy for such childish nonsense, and anyway today the rain was coming down in stair-rods and anyone foolish enough to stick their arm out of the window would only get their sleeve sopping wet. In any case, the garden wall was in reality several feet away – it just looked very close, especially in the rain. The garden was in fact big enough to have a miniature potting shed in one corner and a tiny lawn in the middle with a border of flowerbeds all around it and a sapling apple tree, bravely struggling to grow up to be a proper tree, in the middle.

Busy as she was, Mary Ann always took time to admire the pretty little sapling and on sunny days, when she worked with the window open, she often murmured it a few encouraging words and told it what a brave little tree it was to be sure.

But today Mary Ann shivered as she filled the kettle at the sink, though it wasn’t really cold in the scullery. It was just that the cheerless view of the garden streaming with rain made it seem quite chilly. A nice cup of tea would be just the thing, she thought. A good thing it was teatime. Just as she was setting the kettle to boil on the hottest part of the stove, she heard Amelia’s step in the hall and smiled. Amelia was uncanny. She always knew when it was time for tea, even though she never wore a watch. She kept that lovely gold watch and chain of hers in a tiny drawer that was part of the mirror-stand in her bedroom. Afraid of losing it, she said.

Mary Ann could understand that. It was important to keep valued possessions safe. She had valuable things too, which she liked to keep hidden from prying eyes in her little attic bedroom. Although it was small and
low-ceilinged
, Mary Ann loved her room. Amelia’s mother had gone to a lot of trouble to make it cosy. She’d hung some lovely flowery curtains at the window and put a bockety old armchair in one corner with a big soft cushion that matched the curtains to protect Mary Ann from the wires sticking up out of the old upholstery, and the high bed had a heavy white cotton counterpane with a
tasselly white fringe, dropping almost to the floor.

This house in Casimir Road was of course much smaller than the fine one the Pims had lived in in
Kenilworth
Square, in the days when they’d been wealthy merchants and had kept three servants, including Mary Ann, who at that time had been their maid-of-all-work; but it was adequate for their needs and much more comfortable than the one they’d had to move to two years before, when they’d fallen on hard times; and the main thing was, it was just big enough to be able to squeeze Mary Ann in as well as the family. Nowadays, the Pims were able to afford to live a little better, and to
re-employ
Mary Ann, this time as a cook-general. At sixteen and a bit, she was very young for such a responsible position, but Amelia’s mother wouldn’t have dreamt of employing anyone other than their old friend when they moved to this house and needed a servant to help keep it.

‘Tea-kettle on already, Mary Ann?’ said Amelia, coming into the kitchen and flopping onto a wooden chair. She hooked her booted foot under another chair, dragged it noisily across the flags and swung both her feet up onto it.

‘Sloven!’ said Mary Ann cheerfully.

‘Humph!’ replied Amelia, and she wriggled her toes luxuriously inside her boots. Her skirt hung like curtains on either side of the bridge that her legs made between the two chairs.

‘Slattern, then, if you prefer,’ amended Mary Ann.

‘Stop nagging,’ said Amelia comfortably, throwing back her head as if to examine the ceiling. But she wasn’t examining the ceiling, as her eyes were tightly shut. She took some deep, noisy breaths, stretched both arms back over her head and yawned.

‘And you used to be such a young lady, Amelia Pim!’ said Mary Ann in mock outrage. ‘More like an overgrown kitten, you are now. Put yer hand to yer mouth when you yawn, can’t you.’

‘Sorry,’ said Amelia, opening her eyes, straightening up her shoulders and turning her neck from side to side, as if to relieve an ache. ‘I’m tired, Mary Ann. Don’t be such a nanny.’

‘What has you so tired?’ asked Mary Ann without much sympathy, reaching for the tea-caddy. If anyone had a right to be tired around here, Mary Ann thought it was herself. She was the one that had to cook three meals a day for the family, keep the fires in, and do all the dusting, polishing and cleaning, and the washing and ironing too.

‘Typewriting,’ said Amelia, wriggling her shoulders and still arching her neck. ‘That machine of Mama’s is lovely, but it’s hard work, very sore on the shoulders.’

Amelia’s mother had taken up work as a lady
typewriter
, which was a terribly modern sort of a thing to be, and went off to town in the mornings by tram, wearing a merry straw boater cocked jauntily on one side of her
head, and carrying a leather music-fold that she used as a briefcase. Amelia thought that she too might learn the womanly art of stenography, but she was finding it tough going and hard work.

‘Who’s in for tea, apart from yourself?’ Mary Ann asked.

‘Pour a cup for Grandmama and one for Edmund, please,’ said Amelia. ‘I’ll take them their tea, and then I’ll be back.’ Nowadays, Amelia nearly always had her tea with Mary Ann in the kitchen. She’d given up her drawing-room ways long since. While Mary Ann poured the red, fragrant brew into the cups, Amelia buttered some slices of tea-brack and arranged them on a plate. Then she took the tray to the drawing-room, where her eight-year-old brother Edmund was learning his spellings and Grandmama was listening to him with an air of patient suffering.

Edmund lay flat on his back on the floor, and every time he uttered a letter, he waved a leg frantically in the air. When he got a letter wrong, he waved both legs and beat the carpet with the palms of his hands and said, ‘No, no, no, that’s not it!’ He seemed to believe that all these movements and protestations were necessary to relieve the mental stress of searching for the correct spellings of such testing words as
snipping
and
horseshoe
.

‘Up, Edmund!’ cried Amelia as she came into the room.

Edmund rolled onto his front, heaved himself onto all
fours, and finally stood up. Then he sat down in an
armchair
with a plonk and wriggled himself comfortable among the cushions. Amelia laid a restraining hand across his knees, which were bobbing precariously, and said ‘Steady now,’ before handing him his cup of milky tea.

Grandmama laid aside the grubby, dog-eared jotter where Edmund had scrawled all the words he had to learn to spell in heavy black pencil, and reached
gratefully
for her tea.

‘I don’t know how you put up with him, Grandmama,’ said Amelia admiringly, but in a soft voice so as not to offend Edmund, of whom she was much fonder than she ever let on.

‘Ah, but think of the progress he is making!’ said Grandmama, looking proudly at her grandson, his mouth already full of tea-brack. ‘We can tolerate a bit of jerking about on the floor if the dear boy gets his lessons learnt.’

‘Which is heavier, Amelia,’ piped up Edmund, ‘a ton of feathers or a ton of coal?’

‘Don’t think you can trick me, Edmund Robert Pim,’ said Amelia, playing along with the little boy. ‘It’s
feathers
, of course, because feathers are lighter.’ And she winked at Grandmama.

‘Girls are such
idiots
!’ said Edmund in a satisfied tone and swung his legs rapturously.

‘Edmund, I have no idea what you are wittering about,’ said Amelia, pretending to be put out. ‘But do
stop wriggling or you’ll spill your tea. Do you think he needs help with his arithmetic, Grandmama?’

Grandmama’s face was unusually pink. She didn’t answer Amelia, just shook her head. Amelia shook hers too and left the room with a flounce, which confirmed Edmund in his opinion about the intellectual capacities of girls.

‘Oh, Grandmama,’ Edmund spluttered delightedly, as the door closed behind Amelia. ‘And she thinks that I need help with my arithmetic!’

The grandmother smiled, and her grandson rocked back and forth on his chair in a wave of mild hilarity. As he rocked, Edmund remembered something. He slid his hand down the side of his chair, and felt with satisfaction the bulge of his hidden treasure. It was something hard and knobbly and cold to the touch. He gave it a
reassuring
pat and pushed it a little further into the shady gap between the cushion and the upholstered frame of the armchair, where it nestled down in the dusty, musty, horsehair-smelling darkness. Grandmama drank her tea, and never noticed a thing.

A
melia worried about her hat. Since she had grown up to the impressively adult age of fifteen and had taken to putting her hair up, hats had taken on a whole new character. Before, you just rammed one over your ears, and, as long as it was a reasonably good fit, you could usually rely on its staying in contact with your head. But now there was lots of positioning and
hatpinning
to be done, and still, she felt, no matter how
carefully
the hat was pierced and pinioned into place, one really had to concentrate all the time one was wearing it in order to make sure it stayed on. To think how exasperated she used to get about the way Mama’s hair kept coming down and her hats tilted off! She had no idea
being
grown up was going to be so difficult.

Today, the hat was doubly problematic. Amelia was planning to take an afternoon stroll on the East Pier at Kingstown, with the group of friends with whom she
was allowed to go walking on Sundays, and there were sure to be nasty little sea breezes to challenge even the best-anchored hat. So she pressed an extra three hatpins into her scalp – or that was what it felt like – and pulled the brim of her hat as low as she dared over her
forehead
. It restricted her vision, but only upwards, and who needs to see upwards? she reasoned with herself.

The doorbell rang at this point, and Amelia was
rescued
from her hat. She wouldn’t answer straight away. Instead she would prolong the delicious anticipation, by first putting her head – with its battened-down hat atop – around the drawing-room door.

‘Goodbye, everyone!’ she chirruped.

Her family looked up from their Sunday afternoon pursuits – Papa and Edmund from their chess game, which Papa was letting Edmund win again, with no regard to the boy’s moral education but to his great delight, Mama from her latest large volume from the
circulating
library, and Grandmama from her thoughts – and they all wished Amelia a good afternoon.

‘Don’t fall in!’ shouted Edmund. ‘Or Frederick will have to leap in after you gallantly and then you’ll both drown. Or worse still, he’ll rescue you and have to give you the kiss of life. I don’t
think
Papa would approve of that.’

‘Humph,’ said Papa, and then added unkindly and uncharacteristically, ‘Check!’

‘Goodbye Edmund,
dear
!’ said Amelia with sarcastic
emphasis, as she closed the door. ‘And watch out for your queen.’

It was Frederick on the doorstep, as she knew it would be. She could see his tall shape through the stained glass and the outline of his face in profile as he stood looking at the garden. He looked like a distorted coloured jigsaw of himself. But she would know that shape anywhere – the tall figure, the lean jaw, the blur of curls. She smiled with happiness and opened the door. He turned to face her, and immediately a little of her happiness started to drain away. His face was pale, drawn, shadowy, and his eyelids were heavy, as if he hadn’t been sleeping. As soon as his eyes met hers, he made a visible effort to cheer up.

‘Hello, Amelia!’ he cried, with too much enthusiasm.

‘Hello, Frederick,’ Amelia replied, with exaggerated quietness, as if she were trying to compensate for his false cheeriness.

The others – almost a dozen all told, including
somebody’s
older married sister who had been dragooned into chaperoning them and wore a stiff, bored
expression
– were clustered at the gate, bobbing and swaying with chatter like flowering elder at the mercy of the breeze. The day was bright and blustery cool, the sky silken blue, shot with the merest streaks of cloud, and the sun was high, high in the sky, and warm if you were in its direct Cyclops gaze. The lightness of the day buoyed up all their spirits, and they hailed Amelia with
loud cries and extravagant gestures. She smiled at them all, promptly forgot Frederick’s dark mood and put her hand to her hat as soon as she felt the first lively gust beating around her ears, but the hat was quite secure.

The chattering group moved off as soon as Amelia and Frederick joined them, and all the way to the station they vied with each other to tell the best jokes and make the wittiest remarks. The boys cuffed each other playfully about the shoulders and made mock boxing motions in each other’s faces when one of them said something the others thought vain or naughty or challenging, and the girls pulled at their jackets when the boxing motions looked at all threatening and clicked with their tongues as if they were calming small children.

Frederick didn’t join in the general good-natured hubbub, but he was always at Amelia’s side, his hand under her elbow whenever they came to a road they had to cross. When they clambered onto the train,
Frederick
tugged quickly at Amelia’s sleeve and nodded his head towards an empty seat a little back from where the others had piled themselves in a giggling heap. Amelia turned towards the seat he indicated, but just then one of the girls called out: ‘No, no, there’s room for you two here. Look, this gentleman is just leaving.’ And she pointed out a seat opposite herself and another girl just being vacated by a large man with a small dog yapping at his feet. Amelia immediately sat down opposite her friend and
patted the seat beside her invitingly. Frederick hesitated for a moment, and then joined her.

‘Or maybe you two love-birds wanted to sit apart and do a bit of billing and cooing!’ said the girl who had pointed out the seat, slyly.

Amelia blushed and curled her lower lip under her front teeth. Frederick said nothing but looked out of the window. He must be embarrassed too, thought Amelia. Bother! She should have sat apart with him after all. He must have something he wanted to discuss with her.

There was a lot of silly pointing and laughing at the large, wobbling man and his ridiculously small dog as they waddled (the man) and bounded (the dog) along the platform towards the exit. Amelia couldn’t help
joining
in the laughter. The pair did look funny, though sweet too, in a way.

An army recruitment poster on the station wall caught someone’s eye. ‘Look, everyone!’ she cried. ‘Do you have any womenfolk worth defending?’ she read out in a challenging tone. ‘Golly! Do you think we’re worth defending, girls?’

Frederick shifted beside Amelia on the seat.

Amelia looked through the dusty window of the train at the poster. It showed a peasant woman in a shawl. The tone of the question made her feel uneasy. It
suggested
that women were somehow pathetic and defenceless, and in a curious way it seemed subtly to make women responsible for the war. And yet, it had an
odd appeal. She felt guiltily thrilled by the idea of armies of soldiers marching off to war to secure the safety of their women. The guilt was because she knew war was always wrong.

‘Definitely!’ called one girl.

‘I’ll say!’ said another.

‘My dears,’ said one of the boys, flinging out his arms in mock gallantry, ‘every single one of you is infinitely precious, but I’d rather stay in nice, safe Rathgar, if it’s all the same to you.’

Everyone laughed, and the ones nearest to the boy who had spoken smacked him about the shoulders.

‘It’s not a laughing matter,’ said Frederick suddenly, shuffling his feet and staring straight ahead, at nobody in particular. ‘War is too serious. People get killed. It’s beastly and horrible and dangerous, and I think you lot are beastly to joke about it like that.’

Amelia was amazed at the vigour of Frederick’s
reaction
and looked at him curiously. She expected him to take an anti-war view, of course, but he spoke with real passion, as if he were personally touched by this war. He didn’t meet her eye.

‘Gosh! What a speech, everybody!’ said the boy who had made the mock outburst, appealing to the others for support.

‘Quakers!’ whispered somebody else. ‘Pacifists.’

A quick mutter went around the group, accompanied by a few embarrassed giggles, quickly squashed, and
followed by a moment’s silence.

Nobody challenged Frederick – some of the others were Quakers too, including Amelia of course, and would probably have shared his views anyway – but there was an uneasy atmosphere for a while. People stopped joking about the war, which was raging in Europe even as they sat on their train on their way to their Sunday afternoon walk. The conversation turned to people they knew who had enlisted. Several people mentioned cousins, neighbours, acquaintances, who hadn’t come back from the war. Nobody had lost an immediate relative, but everyone’s life had been touched in some way by the war. It had been going on for almost two years now.

After his little outburst Frederick continued to look straight ahead. Amelia put her hand quickly over the back of his, where it lay on the seat beside her, and gave it an encouraging pat, but when Frederick turned to acknowledge her gesture, his look was troubled. Amelia tipped the brim of her bothersome hat up a little so that she could see into his eyes and read his mood, but hat brim or no hat brim she could not mistake the darting shadows in his gold-flecked eyes and the little lines of worry around the bridge of his nose.

They tumbled higgledy-piggledy out of the train and onto the platform at Kingstown. The sun was like a bright button now, radiant and splendid, but distant and without heat, or not enough to penetrate the salty
breezes. The group marched briskly along to keep warm, breaking into a run at times, and wrapping their coats and shawls as tightly to their bodies as they could to defeat the cold gusts that whipped around them and assaulted their clothing at every opening, trying to trickle up their cuffs, lashing and flapping about their hems and insinuating themselves through their
buttonholes
even.

All afternoon, Frederick was silent, thoughtful,
pressing
into the wind with Amelia gathered close. Several times he looked as if he was just about to draw her aside from the group and have a quiet word with her. She wished he would – she wanted to hear what it was that was bothering him – but every time, something
happened
to distract them. On one occasion, it was an
incident
with a hat – not Amelia’s, though. A particularly determined gust lifted the thing off its owner’s head and it went whizzing along as if it were motorised and landed several yards ahead of the party. Those in the vanguard made a dash after it, but just as they were about to nab it, it lifted itself off the pier, sailed merrily over the edge and landed in the harbour, where it floated and drifted quite unabashed. One of the boys lay down full length on the pier and tried to fish it out with the handle of an umbrella, but it was away out of reach, bobbing atop the blue-green waves.

‘Jump in and rescue it!’ shouted some of the girls. ‘Go on, be a man!’ They didn’t really mean it. They were only
teasing. But even so, the young fellow looked a bit sheepish as he stood up and wiped the grit off his knees.

‘Aww!’ called the girls.

The boy made a face at them, and they chased him for several yards along the pier and beat him with their umbrellas when they caught him.

Amelia laughed at their antics and turned to Frederick to point out their silliness to him, but he was looking in quite the opposite direction. Still worried, Amelia tucked her hand further into the crook of his elbow and gave it a little squeeze.

‘Amelia!’ said Frederick, turning to look at her. ‘
Amelia
, I …’

There came a gust of laughter from the group further down the pier as the would-be rescuer of his lady’s hat knelt down and threw his hands up in the air, begging for mercy. Amelia was distracted and looked towards the source of the laughter, and smiled. Frederick said no more. He too smiled at the others and their silly game and made an effort to put aside whatever was on his mind, for this day.

When he said goodbye to Amelia that evening at her garden gate, under a still sky washed with mauve light, he took off his hat and made her a funny little bow, like a grown-up. Well, of course, Frederick was eighteen now, which very nearly was grown up. Amelia longed to be as grown up as that.

‘Amelia,’ he said, in a solemn sort of voice.

‘Yes, Frederick?’ said Amelia, thinking he was about to confess, finally, whatever it was that had been bothering him all afternoon.

‘Oh, nothing, just goodbye, Amelia.’

‘Is something the matter, Frederick?’

‘No, no. I say, your hat is ever so smart.’

‘Oh,’ said Amelia, putting a tentative hand to her head. The hat was still there. She had managed to forget it after all.

‘Well, goodbye again,’ said Frederick stiffly.

‘Goodbye, Frederick,’ said Amelia, ‘I’ll see you next Sunday?’

Frederick didn’t reply.

Amelia broke away from him, disappointed, and opened the gate. On the doorstep, she turned and gave him a little wave. He was still standing there, holding his hat. He raised it in response to her wave. He remained standing there until the door had opened, and Amelia disappeared inside.