Opposite the Cross Keys (11 page)

Perhaps doubly put on her mettle by May Bowden's aspersions, she not only supervised my bath as if I were still a baby, but insisted on washing my hair, which I could well have done without. When at last I was allowed into my bed, hair damp, my clothes whisked away for laundering before my mother could see them, she brought me, as custom dictated, a book for bedtime reading, for once not consulting my wishes in the matter. The book was
The Frog Prince
.

I was, however, too sleepy, and said so. What I didn't say was, that for all her soaping and shampooing, I could still, when I turned my nose into the hollow of my upper arm, smell Opposite the Cross Keys on my skin: the sweet-sour smell of poverty.

Between waking and sleep, I could not decide whether to feel glad or sorry I wasn't poor. True, it meant I shouldn't inherit the kingdom of heaven (by ‘poor in spirit' I understood too poor even to afford the bottle of Johnnie Walker my father kept out on the sideboard to offer visitors). But whilst it would be galling, on the Last Day, to find the gates of the Celestial City closed against me, I should at least have had May Bowden's money on earth by way of compensation. Whether heaven was worth being poor for was a question which required further thought.

Maud came over to the bed to take
The Frog Prince
away. I reached up my arms, pulled her down and kissed her.

‘I do love you,' I said.

Maud said, ‘I love you too.' That is, what she actually said was, ‘
Now
what is it?' but I knew what she meant.

I first went to Salham St Awdry to stay, not just going there for the day, more than a year later, in July, when I was getting over chickenpox. In those days, children who had contracted the disease were deemed infectious so long as any scabs remained in place, so that although I felt, and was, perfectly well, I was forced to stay away from school and forbidden all companionship of my own age, the only permissible alternatives either to stay indoors or else be smuggled out, hat pulled down over face to conceal the tell-tale evidence, to deserted places like Mousehold Heath on the edge of the city, where there was nothing to do but sit and listen to the gorse pods popping in the heat of the summer afternoon.

It was intolerable, and so was Dr Parfitt, a foolish old man whose yellow-stained moustache completely hid his mouth and came down to his chin, almost. He wore the moustache, he said, because it trapped the germs to which his profession particularly exposed him. Whenever he ran into my father, he invariably exhorted him, for his health's sake, to grow his moustache longer. He was, however, puzzled by his female patients, finding it hard to account for the fact that, although on the whole moustacheless, they tended to outlive his male ones.

My mother said it was Dr Parfitt who first mooted the desirability of getting me away to the country – presumably, contact with country children didn't count. It may have been he, or it may have been my mother, driven to distraction by my bored naughtiness; but I am pretty sure it was Maud's idea. What she wanted was to get me away from May Bowden.

May Bowden was my one refuge during this trying time. When I called on her she would take me into her dining-room and bring out several small cloth bags, drawn up at the neck with a cord, whose contents she would shake out on to the green chenille cover of her dining table.

There were buttons and brooches and all manner of small trinkets, some worthless, some, as I now think, of beauty and price. One morning when I pricked my finger on a hat-pin shaped like a dagger she took me into the kitchen to wash and bandage the wound. Because I had been so brave, she said – I carefully omitting to point out that I was years beyond fussing over such small mishaps – I might choose any one thing to take home and keep.

I chose a tiny carved mouse, curled nose to tail, no bigger than a button. And that was what it was, my father told me when I showed it to him, one of the Japanese toggles called netsuke. It was valuable, he said, and I ought to give it back, but my mother said May Bowden would only be offended, and it wasn't as if she couldn't afford it. What had begun to worry my mother a little – she spoke diffidently, for she had difficulty in speaking ill of anybody – was whether it was safe for me to be alone in the house with that dotty old maid.

It did not take much in the way of brains to discern behind this misgiving the fine Italian hand of Maud. Maud even tried to stop me visiting Pillow in the garden, asserting it to be cruelty to wild animals to treat them as pets, brushing aside my insistence that, on the contrary, the little creature looked forward to my coming. When none of her devices succeeded she changed tack, and began to speak of asking Tom whether he couldn't find a she-toad to keep poor lonely Pillow company. I was not deceived. What really moved her, I could swear, was a wicked desire to see her rival's garden awash with baby toads, a mini-plague such as, on a grander scale, had afflicted the Ancient Egyptians. I think she hoped that if only there were enough of them it might induce May Bowden to tell me, as Pharaoh had told the Israelites, get out of my sight for God's sake: never darken my door again.

Only two weeks remained of the summer term when it was decided that I was to go to St Awdrey's, returning to Norwich in September, hopefully a new girl. Terms were struck, Mrs Fenner paying me the compliment of offering to take me for nothing (which I overheard my sorely tried brother Alfred say was about all I was worth in my present frame of mind). Arrangements were made for the carrier to drop off extra supplies every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Nothing was said about family visits, it being tacitly understood that a little respite from each other's company would be good for all of us. I was, after all, going to be no more than four miles from home, and Maud would be down every Sunday to report on how I was getting along and whether I needed anything.

That Maud, my handmaiden and footstool, was not coming with me was the biggest surprise of the whole arrangement. Unable to envisage any other life but one in which she was perpetually within call, I had not noticed, as I grew older, that her primary function of nurserymaid had been progressively subsumed by those of cook, housekeeper, Supreme Being. Mrs Hewitt still came every Monday and Tuesday to do the washing and the ironing, but the services of a dim creature called Edie, whose duties consisted principally of doing down the stairs and whitestoning the front step, had been dispensed with; Maud rising that little bit earlier to ensure that no one, not even the postman on his first round, should see one of her exalted status performing such a menial task.

Once I had got over the shock, the prospect of Opposite the Cross Keys
sans
Maud grew ever more delectable, though at the same time a little unnerving. The prospect of freedom, which I had been taught was a good thing, even though I was not quite sure what it was, nor what you did with it once you got it, excited me. Freedom that meant not having Maud telling you what to do, telling you what not to do. Freedom that meant, the reverse of the coin, having to tell yourself what to do, and taking the consequences.

One day after dinner, as Maud was changing her morning apron for her fancy afternoon one with lace round the edges, I put my arms round her.

‘I do wish you were coming with me,' I said, meaning it just at that moment; and also, not meaning it. At that time of life, believing two contradictory propositions simultaneously presented no problems. Life was a thousand different roads along which one could travel at one and the same time.

‘Mind what you're doing to that apron!' She unclasped my arms firmly, but her eyes were gentle. ‘There's worse dangers at sea. You'll get used to it.'

‘I won't, you know. I shall miss you dreadfully.'

‘Tell us another!'

Two days before I was due to leave, something awful happened. My scabs fell off, all together. I woke up in the morning and there they were, on my pillow, dot, dot, dot. With them went the whole
raison d'être
for my visit to St Awdry's. I would be sent back to school. I wasn't infectious any more.

Dr Parfitt and his moustache were due after breakfast to pronounce finally on my fitness for the journey. It was a time for desperate measures.

With my right hand I delicately removed the shed scabs from the pillow, transferring them one at a time to my left palm which I kept extended flat in front of me. Choosing quiet floorboards which wouldn't inform Maud I was up, I tiptoed over to the dressing table and fished out the jar of glue I kept in one of the small drawers which flanked the central mirror.

The scabs were aggravatingly brittle, the glue maddeningly gooey, but I persevered. By the time the last fleck of scab had disintegrated into dust I had glued the greater number of them back in place. My face, scabby, infectious, smiled back at me in triumph even as I heard Maud's step upon the stair.

In fact, I looked scabbier than ever, thanks to frilly little edgings of glue which outlined the scabs rather as Maud's lace outlined her afternoon apron. Dr Parfitt looked at me thoughtfully, riffled through his moustache as if looking for his prescription pad, and prescribed his runny cream. He had two in his repertoire – one the consistency of dumpling batter, the other more like a stiff pastry mix. Maud always contended that his selection of one rather than the other depended on what his wife had had over from dinner the day before.

One of the questions that gave me much thought in the days before I left for St Awdry's was, where was I going to sleep? Somehow I sensed I was never to be allowed through that door at the side of the fireplace.

‘Am I going to take Alfred's camp bed, then?' I finally asked when I could contain my curiosity no longer. Maud looking surprised, I explained, ‘For me to sleep on, I mean.'

‘What you want that ole thing for? Wha's the matter with the sofa?'

‘It's a very nice sofa,' I agreed placatingly. ‘Only, it
is
a little prickly.'

‘Should 'a thought of that before. Not too late to change your mind.'

‘Oh no!' I protested, alarmed. ‘I'm sure it will be beautifully comfortable, once I get used to it.'

Maud actually grinned. ‘No call to overdo it! I warn't born yesterday. Mattress pad an' a couple of blankets 'll take care of the pricks. You'll sleep like a queen, see if you don't.'

There was indeed something queenlike about my departure for Salham St Awdry. My brother, who was to deliver me and my goods to Opposite the Cross Keys, had piled the car so high that, give or take a Morris Oxford in place of Tudor baggage carts, the resemblance to the Virgin Queen embarking for her royal progress of Norfolk in 1578 must have been very marked.

‘Sure that's the lot?' he inquired caustically, having, with difficulty, wedged me into the front seat on top of a pile of pillows.

May Bowden came out to the car with her own contribution: a wooden painting case and an easel, items Alfred hadn't the heart to turn down, even though the easel had lost the pegs which held the canvas in place, and the case, when she tried to open it in order to display its incomparable contents (all May Bowden's benefactions were, in her own word, incomparable) proved immovably cemented with tubes of paint put away any old how on the last of the dear, dead days when she had been a young lady, genteelly sketching.

All in all, it wasn't an easy day for my poor brother. Arrived at Opposite the Cross Keys in the middle of a blazing afternoon, we found no sign of Mrs Fenner: only Ellie sitting outside in the sun, combing her hair. I went up to her and said, at my most winsome, ‘Ellie, this is my brother Alfred.' And, ‘Alfred, this is Maud's sister Ellie. I don't believe you've met.'

Over a pile of bedding, my brother's face, frank and handsome, smiled down at the woman.

‘Sorry I can't shake hands,' he apologized. ‘I'm a bit loaded, as you can see.'

‘Please yourself,' returned Ellie, turning her back on him. ‘All one to me.'

If Ellie was a shock to my brother, it was as nothing to his first sight of the interior of Opposite the Cross Keys. Inured by many visits since my first to its dirt, its smells, I hadn't thought to prepare him. I had forgotten how, that first time, I had been physically sick.

Judging by Alfred's sudden pallor, he wasn't far short of the same condition himself.

‘Sylvia!' he hissed, keeping his voice down for fear of being overheard by Ellie, outside. ‘You can't stay here! Impossible! If any of us had ever guessed how it was once you got inside – !' He took a firmer grasp of the blankets and pillows. ‘I'm going to take these things straight back to the car. We'll think of some excuse.'

‘You mustn't! You mustn't!' In my eagerness I grabbed at his burden and the pillows tumbled to the floor. Gyp waddled over, lay down on top of them, and scratched himself luxuriously.

‘Get off, Gyp! Alfred, you mustn't!' I didn't care if Ellie heard me or not. ‘You don't understand! It's lovely here, it really is! Lovely!'

‘Lovely? This?'

‘The loveliest place in the world.'

That stopped him. He stood goggling at me. After a little, he dumped the blankets on the sofa.

‘This do?' He bent down and pushed Gyp off the pillows; picked them up and placed them on top of the blankets. He kissed me. I hugged him tight.

‘Oh, Alfred!'

‘You're a funny little thing and no mistake.' He looked about him, taking in the room's gorgeous awfulness with a look of bafflement. ‘I'd sooner spend my hols breaking stones on Dartmoor. And that sister of Maud's! What Chamber of Horrors did they dig her out of?'

My heart jumped with gratitude. The Fenners' calm acceptance of Ellie's beauty had always disturbed me; made me doubt whether I was capable of making a proper judgement. If I could be wrong about Ellie, I could be wrong about everything.

I covered up my relief with a giggle. ‘The Fenners think she's beautiful.'