The Scarecrow (12 page)

Muttering to herself and making angry chops at space with her small clenched fists, Prudence was half-way along the main street before she realised people were watching her curiously. She fled down an alleyway, wove in and out of narrow lanes and finally sank down on the stump of a macrocarpa tree. As the turmoil in her mind subsided and her breathing slowed up, the tear drops began to gather, but her self-pity suddenly became transformed into a cold fear. She was alone and, save for a street lamp at the other end of the lane, it was dark.

Behind the main street, on our side, is the oldest part of Klynham. There was a lane which could be walked, as a short cut to our block, but a section of it was very swampy and we seldom used it. Standing amid rusty camellias and crabapple trees there were a few unoccupied cottages. In one section, choked with fennel and blackberry, all that remained standing was a chimney. The sheds alongside the cottages only just managed to remain upright with assistance from ivy and honeysuckle. There was a blacksmith’s forge in the skeleton of a shed, a business which subsisted, as far as Les and I could make out, on the patronage of one important customer, namely the council draught-horse. Through a narrow, foliage-choked gully, flowed the town creek to emerge in a deep, abandoned quarry
and then disappear again, enchantingly, into a huge pipe. One of these days Les and I planned, as a supreme adventure, to explore the pipe. A shudder runs down my back as I write. I know now as surely as two and two make four that somewhere in that narrow gully or maybe even in the big pipe itself are
the bones of Sam Finn.

It was very still. Even from the main street there drifted to Prudence no sounds of traffic. Her skin crawled as she became aware of a sound like slow footfalls. She was too petrified to move. But soon she made out the sound to be water dripping from a tank on one of the derelict buildings huddled in the nearby gloom. With shaky knees she arose. It was only a short dash around a corner and down the alley to the main street, but it involved passing the gloomy, ornate windows of Dabney’s funeral parlour and chapel. The grimy windows of the chapel dimly reflected a light on the main street. On this side of the track down to the quarry were the grimly staring doors of the high shed in which, Prudence remembered with horror, the museum-piece hearse was garaged. The opening of the track itself was steeped in menacing darkness. It seemed to Prudence that she was being watched from behind one of the chapel windows, and that, as she stared back, a head was stealthily withdrawn. With a yell of terror she fled back the way she had come and no one before or since ever emerged onto and surveyed the few lights of Klynham’s main street with a greater feeling of salvation.

It was the end of the week before we found out at home that Prudence had quit her job. I do not know what sort of story the amorous Quin told his good lady, but I can imagine he was on shaky ground for a day or two.

On the Thursday Ma said, ‘I passed Mrs Quin in the main street this afternoon and she cut me dead. Just sailed past me like a gallon on the main street.’

‘Galleon,’ I said.

‘Galleying she certainly was,’ declared Ma. ‘With her nose stuck up in the air like an empty cannon in the park. I can hardly bring myself to credit she did not see me, or overhear me speaking to her very politely, and it is plain to me, as a consequence of being humilified like this on the main street, that she considers herself a cut above the likes of us. And who would she have been, I ask yuh, before she trapped into matrimony this
Quin with all his money, but plain Lizzie Haywood, whose father as near as dammit went to jail for stealing a horse? Next time I come across that stuck-up piece of goods I’ll let her know in no uncertain manner that, much as she might like to forget her humble early oranges, other memories around Klynham are not so short, even if they are wedded to toilers and junk collectors.’

‘Please, Natalie,’ said Pop. ‘You must refrain from coming to light with such, hrrump, demeaning statements. The firm of Dee-aitch Poindexter is held in, hrrump, no little esteem in the community. The business world is like a machine and the part played by every cog is of vital importance. The valuing of antiques, their purchase and marketing—’

‘Did you say cog,’ cackled Ma, ‘or clot? No, Danyel, you’re an honest, working man, whose only shortcoming is a predeelectshun for the bottle, though I have always felt my hands are tied in this matter, my own brother, Athol, having led you by the hand through the years into increasingly evil and drunken habits. I’ve watched it, Danyel, from our early days, even from our wedding day, the shame and mortification of what has left a scar on me forever and a dark cloud in the sky. If I’d had a grain of sense I would have walked away in that beautiful frock and left yuh to marry my brother instead of me, though who would have held yuh up for the ceremony or stooped to soil their hands on the pair of yuh, is beyond me.’

‘Natalie,’ said Pop, ‘I refuse to sit here and listen to yuh bringing up the mistakes of bygone years which, in all conscience, I have tried to repay a thousand times. Hrrump. Natalie—’

The tone of his voice became so different and he cocked his
head on one side so sharply that Ma, who was about to sail into him again, said ‘Yes?’

‘Yuh looked beautiful, Natalie,’ said Pop, ‘the most beautiful bride that ever was a man’s good fortune to behold, let alone have the honour to join in holy mat-re-mahoney. And I, stupid young idiot, blind, stupid young fool, disgraced yuh to a certain extent, being in those days unable to handle my liquor in conjunction with also being intoxicated with yuh beauty.’

‘Well, well, Danyel,’ said Ma, looking at my father across the table.

‘Are there any more snarlers in the pan?’ I said.

‘Yuh were the flower of the district, Natalie,’ said Pop. ‘And how yuh ever turned yuh pretty head to look at Dan Poindexter is beyond me and that’s a solid fact.’

‘It’s beyond me, too,’ said Ma laughing, but she did not mean what she said. She reached across the table and took Pop’s hand. ‘No, Danyel, yuh may not have been Young Lochnigarry, or whoever I’m thinking of, but yuh were the boy that stole my heart, even if everybody said yuh hadn’t two shillings to rub together. A fat lot I cared about money, except to do the right thing for the children, but only for us to be all happy and feel that someone cares whether you’re alive or dead.’

‘My dear,’ said Pop, ‘my dearest.’

They squeezed hands and then Ma withdrew hers gently, took my plate, got up and went over and dumped another sausage on it.

‘Well, Danyel,’ she said, ‘we’ve had our ups and downs and doubtless we’re still having ‘em, but if we’ve got love, I’m open to a bet that’s more than Lizzie Quin can say with all that dough that dimwit she married can write his name to. And, when I see
her putting on airs in the main street, as if no one remembers that her father was a horse thief, I’ll just say to her, “So yuh riding the high horse a bit today are yuh? Well, I s’pose it runs in the blood and sometimes it comes all over yuh to feel a horse between yuh legs, but make sure it’s not night time and in someone else’s paddock, Liz
Haywood
Quin!” ‘

On Friday school broke up for the May holidays at two o’clock in the afternoon and Les and I made our way to the town to celebrate over a milkshake. We were self-confessed ghouls and we pressed our noses against the window of Charlie Dabney’s shop for a moment as we passed, under the pretext of glimpsing Uncle Athol.

Charlie Dabney’s business premises ran the whole length of the adjoining alley, the cabinet-making workshop extending three-quarters of the way along, with the chapel and the shed, where the hearse was parked, at the back by the track down to the quarry. On the main street, behind large plate-glass windows, was a display of grimy-looking furniture, which I doubted if any shopper had ever even dreamed of buying, and some wreaths in round glass cases which occasionally, I presumed, were sold whether the customer approved of them or not. Across the alley is the Federal Hotel. Les and I had progressed a few steps past the open doorway when I stopped and went back.

‘C’mon,’ said Les.

‘Prudence,’ I said, looking up the passage. I had glimpsed a very pretty girl leaning against the wall with her hands behind her back and a lock of dark hair over one eye, but it was so unexpected it had called for a double take. She had seen me too and had retreated further up the narrow, uncarpeted passage.

‘Prudence,’ I called again.

She looked around and said desperately, ‘See yuh after, Eddy.’

‘Whatchuh doing in there?’ I insisted.

‘Go’way,’ she said. I went up the boot-bruised, wooden steps of the Federal Hotel and a little way along the passage, stepping over the heaps of dust and empty cigarette packets. A door was open into the bar and the air was heavy with the smell of spirituous and fermented liquors. If I had found Prudence in an opium den I could not have felt worse about it all. She looked washed-out and big-eyed.

‘’Lo, Neddy,’ she said in a dispirited way. ‘Scram willyuh, I’m here on business.’

‘No, yuh not,’ I said. ‘Come along with me.’

‘Oh yuh don’t understand,’ she said, angrily. ‘I’ll see yuh after.’

‘You come with me.’

‘I won’t.’

We glared at each other and Prudence lowered her eyes. ‘I won’t.’

‘Yes yuh will.’

A shadow fell along the passage and there was Les Wilson peering curiously in at us.

‘’Lo, Prudence,’ he said. I knew he was wishing he had stopped off at home to don his pith helmet.

‘C’mon, Pru,’ I said, urgently, and Pru made a sort of disgusted sound, but she came.

When we got out on the footpath Les said, ‘Ned and I’re gunna have a milkshake, Prudence. It’s my shout, I sold my Hornby train to a guy who thinks he can fix it. That’s what
he
thinks. Yuh like a milkshake, Prudence?’

‘Yes, I would,’ said Prudence. ‘A strawberry one and I’d like about five hundred ham sandwiches and about a thousand cheese and onion sandwiches and about a million sausage rolls and a—and a pork pie with an egg on it.’

We looked at her.

‘It was only a little Hornby train,’ said Les, ‘and it was broke.’

‘C’mon, c’mon,’ said Prudence, and took our arms. ‘I’ll settle for the milkshake. Maybe I kin eat the straw or something.

‘I s’pose yuh all wondering what I was doing in the dump,’ she said, when we had ensconced ourselves around an iron table with a glass top. ‘Well now I have to tell yuh that I’m finished up at the Quins’ and I don’t want Ma to find out until I can say I’ve got another job. If I can get a job at the pub I can go home and give her some wages and everything will be jake again.’

‘But Pru,’ I said. ‘Hell! Ma wouldn’t want you hanging around pubs. When did you finish at the Quins’?’

‘Tuesday, I smashed a lot of very val-yoobel things and they growled at me and I walked out and don’t tell me I shouldn’t’ve ‘cause it’s done now and there isn’t nothing anyone can do. I don’t want Ma all upset and Pop going up to Quin’s blowing off steam or something. I just want to get a job and tell Ma I changed because the pay was better. It had better be too, the stingy lot of—’

She put her head down and started to cry a river.

‘Buggers,’ she sobbed. ‘Stingy lot uv buggers.’

Les looked horrified and enchanted at the same time.

‘Do yuh mean to tell me,’ I said, ‘yuh just been pretending to go to work this week? Yuh mean to tell me yuh been going all day without
eating
anything?’

The waitress brought the milkshakes Les had ordered and Prudence bit her lip to help control her sobbing, but her face was streaming and the waitress was obviously intrigued. She put down the three milkshakes and then she came back with a plate so laden she could hardly carry it.

‘What the dickens is that?’ I said.

‘Twenty-eight ham sandwiches,’ said Les miserably. ‘It’s all uh could afford. That Hornby train was broken, y’know.’

I felt sure that I was right when I said that Ma would not relish the idea of her daughter working in an hotel, but Prudence sent Les and me on ahead of her and when she arrived home herself she presented Ma with a fait accompli. In a week’s time she was to start at the Federal as a chambermaid. The wages were twice what the Quins paid her. I’ve forgotten what they were exactly, £2/15/- or something, but I know it seemed princely. Ma was a bit flabbergasted but Prudence’s enthusiasm, the increased wage and the poor opinion which Ma now had of Prudence’s late mistress, Mrs Quin, all combined to make her capitulate.

‘Many’s the time,’ said Ma, ‘I’ve said, and I’ll say again, that a pub is no place for any daughter of mine to work and if Grandma ever finds out she’ll have a fit, but I will say Prudence I admire yuh for yuh interdependence and not standing any nonsense from that horse-stealing Quin creature with her airs and graces, and all the time paying yuh about half what a girl of yuh intelligence could be earning elsewhere. I’ll be the last to deny that the money will make a big difference and if my brave girl can use it to buy some nice things for herself why, who knows, what with your typewriting lessons and all, it may not be long before you’re in some office or other, Prudence, and
we’ll be able to look down our snoot at the like of Lizzie Quin, because when all’s said and done even if your duties are, as you say, upstairs, the money still comes from the bar downstairs and the likker they sell and the trouble and grief that likker has brought into the world is nobody’s bizness.’

I thought I saw an unhappy frown come and go on Prudence’s countenance when Ma mentioned the typewriting lessons and, now I came to think of it, it was strange we had not seen anything of Len Ramsbottom any night since Monday. A few minutes after Prudence left the kitchen I followed her into her room and to my consternation she was in tears again.

It took me a while to wheedle it out of her, but, in the end, she told me the truth about what had happened at Quin’s on the Tuesday night.

‘And now,’ she concluded miserably, ‘he thinks I’m a’—sob, sob—‘hard lot. That’s what he called me, a hard lot.’ Sob, sob.

‘P’raps—’ I said.

‘Never,’ said Prudence fiercely. ‘Never. I’d die sooner than speak to him again. If he thinks I’m a hard lot, let him.’

She got off the bed and put on her overcoat. She looked wildly around the dilapidated room.

‘I’m gunna go for a walk,’ she said. ‘I’ll go off muh nut if I lie down in this room and think about life. If anybody saw me in this room they wouldn’t even be seen speaking to me. They wouldn’t think any more of me than a naminal. That’s what they’d think I wuz if they saw this room and this wallpaper. So that’s where Pru Poindexter sleeps, does she, they’d think. Well then she’s nothing but a naminal.’

I heard the front door close quietly and I know she had gone out that way, so Ma would not see she was howling again.

‘What a life,’ I reflected. Schopenhauer and I would have got along just bully.

I reached out and tore savagely at the hideous roll of rain-and-mildew-blotched wallpaper which billowed down from the ceiling. The repercussions of this impulsive move were out of all proportion. With a loud, tearing sound the entire wall of paper began to rip away from the scrim and sag floorwards. Like an avalanche picking up momentum with its own increasing weight, the ancient paper curved floorwards in a deafening roar and not until it had torn free from the scrim right to the skirting board did it subside at my feet like a dusty, mouldy tent from under which the pole had been wrenched. I gazed at the grotesquely peaked and buckled mountain of paper, open-mouthed. I swallowed hard. I listened. Incredibly, no one outside the room seemed to have heard the din. Furtively I pushed up Prudence’s bedroom window and propped it open. Frantically I began to bundle armfuls of paper out through the window. When it was all outside between the house and the fence, and the evening breeze was shaping up to it experimentally, I wiped the sweat off my face, closed the bedroom door and sauntered out through the kitchen, swiping a box of matches on the way.

In which direction to drag it off and burn it? I stood outside the open bedroom window debating this problem. I cursed myself for having overlooked shutting the window. It was not quite dark yet and the wall the paper had peeled off looked stripped and virginal and somehow willing. The more I peered into the room the more inviting the bare expanse of wall seemed to become.

Friday night was late-shopping night in Klynham and along
the wind-chilled streets I sped, coatless, until the windows of A. C. Wilson, Family Merchant, made a bright oasis on a corner in the gathering dusk. It was a nice shop with its uneven floor and low, battered counters, and nice-smelling too, of cheese and chocolate and sausages and ham and oh, everything. You could buy a pound of butter or a hunting knife in a sheath, a fryingpan, packet of cinnamon, a hurricane lantern. I had not been too persona grata here for some time; ever since, in fact, Les and I had been ordered to empty our pockets out as we left the shop one afternoon; but my family dealt here and Les was his son, so the genial gleam of Mr Wilson’s glasses dimmed only slightly as he nodded to me that Les was in the storeroom. A white-aproned Chester Montgomery positively fawned on me as he conducted me through to a corner of the storeroom where Les was pumping kerosene from a drum into bottles. Chester Montgomery fawned on everybody; but, as Prudence’s brother, I got the full treatment.