The Christmas Mouse (5 page)

A stocking, waiting to be filled with small knickknacks, lay across each pillowcase. As soon as the children were safely asleep, the plan had been to substitute the full pillowcases for the empty ones.

‘I thought she might reappear,’ admitted Mary. ‘She’s twigged, you know, about Father Christmas. Some of the children at school have let it out.’

‘She won’t come down again, I’m certain,’ replied Mrs
Berry comfortingly. ‘Let’s fill up the stockings, shall we? We can put the last-minute odds and ends in when we carry up the pillowcases.’

Mary nodded agreement and went to the parlour, returning with the limp stockings. They were a pair of red and white striped woollen ones, once the property of the vicar’s aunt, and reputedly kept for skating and skiing in her young days. Mary had bought them at a jumble sale, and each Christmas since they had appeared to delight the little girls.

From the dresser drawer, Mrs Berry collected the store of small treasures that had been hidden there for the last week or so. A few wrapped sweets, a curly stick of barley sugar, a comb, a tiny pencil and pad, a brooch and a handkerchief followed the tangerines that stuffed the toe of each stocking. Then, almost guiltily, Mrs Berry produced the final touch – two small wooden Dutch dolls.

‘Saw them in the market at Caxley,’ she said, ‘and couldn’t resist them, Mary. They reminded me of a family of Dutch dolls I had at their age. They can amuse themselves dressing them up.’

The dolls were tucked at the top, their shiny black heads and stiff wooden arms sticking out attractively. The two women gazed at their handiwork with satisfaction.

‘Well, that’s that!’ said Mrs Berry. ‘I’m just going to clear away this tray and tidy up in the kitchen, and I shan’t be long out of bed.’

‘I’ll wait till I’m sure those two scallywags are really asleep,’ answered Mary. ‘I wouldn’t put it past our Jane to pretend, you know. She’s stubborn when she wants to
be, and she’s real set on finding out who brings the presents.’

The hands of the clock on the mantelpiece stood at ten o’clock. How the evening had flown! Mary tidied the table, listening to the gale outside, and the sound of her mother singing in the kitchen.

She suddenly remembered her own small presents upstairs still unwrapped and crept aloft to fetch them. The door of the girls’ room was ajar. She tiptoed in and looked down upon the sleeping pair. It seemed impossible that either of them could be feigning sleep, so rhythmically were they breathing. What angels they looked!

She made her way downstairs and swiftly wrapped up the necklaces and handkerchiefs. The very last, she thought thankfully! Just a tag for Mum’s cyclamen, and I can write that and tie it on when I go to bed.

She selected the prettiest tag she could find, and slipped it into her skirt pocket to take upstairs.

Mrs Berry reappeared, carrying the glass of water that she took to her bedroom every night.

‘I’ll be off then, my dear. Don’t stay up too long. You must be tired.’

She bent to kiss her daughter.

‘The girls have gone off, I think, but I’ll give them another ten minutes to make sure.’

‘See you in the morning, then, Mary,’ said the old lady, mounting the stairs.

Mary raked the hot ashes from the fire and swept up the hearth. She fetched the two bulging pillowcases and put the stockings on top of them. Then she sat in the old armchair and let exhaustion flood through her. Bone-tired, she confessed to herself. Bone-tired!

Above her she could hear the creaking of the floor-boards as her mother moved about, then a cry and hasty footsteps coming down the stairs.

The door flew open and Mrs Berry, clad in her flannel nightgown, stood, wild eyed, on the threshold.

‘Mum, what’s the matter?’ cried Mary, starting to her feet.

‘A mouse!’ gasped Mrs Berry, shuddering uncontrollably. ‘There’s a mouse in my bedroom!’

The two women gazed at each other, horror struck. Mary’s heart sank rapidly, but she spoke decisively.

‘Here, you come by the fire, and let’s shut that door. The girls will be waking up.’

She pushed up the armchair she had just vacated and Mrs Berry, still shuddering, sat down thankfully.

‘You’ll catch your death,’ said Mary, raking a few bright embers together and dropping one or two shreds of dry bark from the hearth on to the dying fire. ‘You ought to have put on your dressing gown.’

‘I’m not going up there to fetch it!’ stated Mrs Berry flatly. ‘I know I’m a fool, but I just can’t abide mice.’

‘I’ll fetch it,’ said Mary, ‘and I’ll set the mousetrap too while I’m there. Where did it go?’

Mrs Berry shivered afresh.

‘It ran under the bed, horrible little thing! You should’ve seen its tail, Mary! A good three inches long! It made me cry out, seeing it skedaddle like that.’

‘I heard you,’ said Mary, making for the kitchen to get the mousetrap.

Mrs Berry drew nearer to the fire, tucking her voluminous nightgown round her bare legs. A cruel draught whistled in from the passage, but nothing would draw her from the safety of the armchair. Who knows how many more mice might be at large on a night like this?

Mary, her mouth set in a determined line, reappeared with the mousetrap and went quietly upstairs. She returned in a moment, carrying her mother’s dressing gown and slippers.

‘Now you wrap up,’ she said coaxingly, as if she were addressing one of her little daughters. ‘We’ll soon catch that old mouse for you.’

‘I’m ashamed to be so afeared of a little creature,’ confessed Mrs Berry, ‘but there it is. They give me the horrors, mice do, and rats even worse. Don’t ask me why!’

Mary knew from experience this terror of her mother’s. She confronted other hazards of country life with calm courage. Spiders, caterpillars, bulls in fields, adders on the heath, any animals in pain or fury found old Mrs Berry completely undaunted. Mary could clearly remember her mother dealing with a dog that had been run over and writhed, demented with pain, not far from their cottage door. It had savaged two would-be helpers, and a few distressed onlookers were wondering what to do next when Mrs Berry approached and calmed the animal in a way that had seemed miraculous. But a mouse sent her flying, and Mary knew, as she found some wood to replenish the fire, that nothing would persuade her mother back to the bedroom until the intruder had been dispatched.

She settled herself in the other armchair, resigned to another twenty minutes or more of waiting. She longed desperately for her bed, but could not relax until her mother was comfortably settled. She listened for sounds from above – the click of the mousetrap that would release her from her vigil, or the noise of the children waking and rummaging for the pillowcases, wailing at the nonappearance of Father Christmas.

But above the noise of the storm outside, it was difficult to hear anything clearly upstairs. She pushed the two telltale pillowcases under the table, so that they were hidden from the eyes of any child who might enter unannounced, and leaned back with her eyes closed.

Invariably, Bertie’s dear face drifted before her when she closed her eyes, but now, to her surprise and shame, another man’s face smiled at her. It was the face of one of Bertie’s workmates. He too had been one of the party on
that tragic wayzgoose, and had written to Mary and her mother soon after the accident. She had known him from childhood. Rather a milksop, most people said of Ray Bullen, but Mary liked his gentle ways and thought none the less of him because he had remained a bachelor.

‘Some are the marrying sort, and some aren’t,’ she had replied once to the village gossip who had been speculating upon Ray’s future. Mary was all too conscious of the desire of busybodies to find her a husband in the months after Bertie’s death. They got short shrift from Mary, and interest waned before long.

‘Too sharp tongued by half,’ said those who had been lashed by it. ‘No man in his senses would take her on, and them two girls too.’

Here they were wrong. One or two men had paid attention to Mary, and would have welcomed some advances on her side. But none were forthcoming. Truth to tell, Mary was in such a state of numbed shock for so long that very little affected her.

But Ray’s letter of condolence had been kept. There was something unusually warm and comforting in the simple words. Here was true sympathy. It was the only letter that had caused Mary to weep and, weeping, to find relief.

She saw Ray very seldom, for their ways did not cross. But that afternoon in Caxley he had been at the bus stop when she arrived laden with baskets and anxious about the little girls amidst the Christmas traffic. He had taken charge of them all so easily and naturally – seeing them on to the bus, disposing of the parcels, smiling at the children and wishing them all well at Christmas – that it was not until she was halfway to Shepherds Cross that
Mary realized that he had somehow contrived to give the little girls a shilling each. Also, she realized with a pang, he must have missed his own bus, which went out about the same time as theirs.

She supposed, leaning back now in the armchair, that her extreme tiredness had brought his face before her tonight. It was not a handsome face, to be sure, but it was kind and gentle, and, from all she heard, Ray Bullen had both those qualities as well as strong principles. He was a Quaker, she knew, and she remembered a little passage about Quakers from the library book she was reading. Something about them ‘making the best chocolate and being very thoughtful and wealthy and good.’ It had amused her at the time, and though Ray Bullen could never be said to be wealthy, he was certainly thoughtful and good.

She became conscious of her mother’s voice, garrulous in her nervousness.

‘It’s funny how you can sense them when you’re frightened of them. Not that I had any premonition tonight, I was too busy thinking about getting those pillowcases safely upstairs. But I well remember helping my aunt clear out her scullery when I was a child. No older than Frances, I was then, and she asked me to lift a little old keg she kept her flour in. And, do you know, I began to tremble, and I told her I just couldn’t do it. “There’s a mouse in there!” I told her.

‘She was so wild. “Rubbish!” she stormed. She was a quick-tempered woman, red haired and plump, and couldn’t bear to be crossed. “Pick it up at once!”

‘And so I did. And when I looked inside, there was a mouse, dead as a doornail and smelling to high heaven! I
dropped that double quick, you can be sure, and it rolled against a bottle of cider and smashed it to smithereens. Not that I waited to see it happen. I was down at the end of the garden, in the privy with the door bolted. She couldn’t get at me there!’

Mary had heard the tale many times, but would not have dreamed of reminding her mother of the fact. It was her mother’s way, she realized, of apologizing for the trouble she was causing.

Mrs Berry hated to be a nuisance, and now, with Mary so near to complete exhaustion, she was being the biggest nuisance possible, the old lady told herself guiltily. Why must that dratted mouse arrive in her bedroom on Christmas Eve?

In the silence that had fallen there was the unmistakeable click of a mousetrap. Mary leaped to her feet.

‘Thank God!’ said Mrs Berry in all seriousness. Panic seized her once more. ‘Don’t let me see it, Mary, will you? I can’t bear to see their tails hanging down.’

‘I’ll bring the whole thing down in the wastepaper basket,’ promised Mary.

But when she returned to the apprehensive old lady waiting below, she had nothing in her hand.

‘He took a nibble and then got away,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to wait a bit longer. I’ve set it a mite finer this time.’

‘I wish you had a braver mother,’ said Mrs Berry forlornly. Mary smiled at her, and her mother’s heart turned over. The girl looked ten years younger when she smiled. She didn’t smile enough, that was the trouble. Time she got over Bertie’s loss. There was a time for grieving, and a time to stop grieving. After all, she was still young and, smiling as she was now, very pretty too.

Conversation lapsed, and the two tired women listened to the little intimate domestic noises of the house, the whispering of the flames, the hiss of a damp log, the rattle of the loose-fitting window. Outside, the rain fell down pitilessly. Mrs Berry wondered if the rolled-up towel was stemming the flood at the back door but was too tired to go and see.

She must have dozed, for when she looked at the clock it was almost eleven. Mary was sitting forward in her chair, eyes fixed dreamily on the fire, miles away from Shepherds Cross.

She stirred as her mother sat up.

‘I’ll go and see if we’ve had any luck.’

Up the stairs she tiptoed once more, and returned almost immediately. She looked deathly pale with tiredness, and Mrs Berry’s heart was moved.

‘Still empty. He’s a fly one, that mouse. What shall we do?’

Mrs Berry took charge with a flash of her old energy and spirit.

‘You’re going to bed, my girl. You’re about done in, I can see. I’ll stay down here for the night, for go up to that bedroom I simply cannot do!’

‘But, Mum, it’s such a beast of a night! You’d be better off in bed. Just wake me if the trap springs and I’ll come and see to it. It’s no bother, honest.’