What Was Promised (9 page)

‘Those are nice names,’ Pond says.

‘You think so? Really I’m Isidora. And Solly is really Solomon.’

‘Like the king,’ Pond says.

‘But you’re clever,’ Dora says. ‘Where did you learn about the king?’

‘In books.’

‘You have books?’

‘Not now,’ Pond says, and takes her hand. He, too, has come to a decision.

3. Autumn

After school they go out to play: Jem, Floss, Iris and Pond.

Their numbers make them brave. They’ve come clear across Long Debris, but this is where the Troll bridge is. You can’t play Troll anywhere else.

The bridge is made of brick and wood. The wood is old railway timber. Once the bridge was bricks and stone, but that was in another time. There’s a field beside the bridge, with chickens in a chicken run and one drayhorse, all ribs and hips, with its nose in a bag.

The horse is still. A lane goes under the bridge and into the trees, blue as slate in the evening light.

An old lady with a terrier peers at them as she goes by. Floss smothers a giggle in her fist. Maybe Iris will make her a troll!

Troll was Jem’s game first. It was his idea, but Floss made the rules. This is how it goes:

One hides. He goes under the bridge, down in the lane where the echo is. That one’s the troll. The troll calls
Who goes on my bridge?
Then it climbs up as fast as it can, and it waits. It listens to the bridge: no looking. When it hears a child it jumps out and shouts,
Troll!
If no one’s on the bridge, the troll has to go back, down in the wet where the echo is. But if anyone’s on the bridge, then they turn into trolls.

Then all the trolls hide under the bridge. They climb down where the echo is, and they all call out together.

Who’s the troll?

Iris is. Her face peers out, a sad imp. ‘I don’t want to be it,’ she calls.

‘Well, you are,’ Floss calls back. ‘It’s decided. You have to do it now.’

It would be better if it was one of the boys. It would be best if it were Pond. Then Floss would win for sure, the way she did before Pond came. And Iris’s a bad troll. She’s too scrawny for climbing, and sometimes she gives up and plays alone with her made-up friends.

They start. Jem is caught first. Sometimes, Floss thinks, he plays to lose. He just likes them to like his game. He wipes his specs and sighs and climbs down to where Iris is. They whisper for a bit together: then,

Who goes on my bridge?

Their voices mix with the echo. It becomes one sound, like that of the markets. It’s all one voice in the end.

Pond always waits too long. Floss is braver than him. She doesn’t run – that’s a mistake – but she goes first, crafty, crabwise. She’s hardly on the bridge when there’s a splashing and Iris pops up. ‘Troll!’ she shouts, but Floss won’t have it.

‘Cheat. You weren’t in the echo place. You have to go back down.’

Iris does. They start again. This time Pond goes with Floss, but just behind. He shadows her. Floss twists round and glares at him.

Go away!
she mouths, and he backsteps, like a dog, keeping his eyes on her. He’s chicken. He’s just like the people he lives with now, the watchmaker who works in the Lane but never shouts like a real coster, and his wife, who’s even shy of Iris.

Still, it’s Floss who’s caught.

Who goes on my bridge?

It’s just Pond now. He’s so quiet. He waits. He waits. He waits.

One more crossing and the trolls have lost; but it’s hard when there are so many of them. Jem pokes his head out early, grinning madly. He shrugs and clambers down. He’s getting tall: the climbing is easy for him.

Who goes on my bridge?
the voice says again.

Pond creeps out. He ghosts forwards. He puts a foot on the timbers. The wind catches a newspaper and it flutters like a broken wing. He’s alright. He’s almost there. He’s so careful. His body is sure.

A man is walking up towards him. Under his cap his face is dark. He whistles as he comes. Pond stands still as stone. His sores itch as the man passes. His feet aren’t a child’s feet, and the trolls don’t come for him. The man is halfway across the bridge when he stops whistling. He slows and stops. He peers back at Pond.

‘You alright there, chum?’

‘
Troll!?
’ Floss screams behind them. ‘
Troll!?
’

When they’re done they sit together, dangling their legs.

‘Jump,’ Floss says to Pond. ‘I dare you.’ And he looks down from the parapet as if he really might; but then he shakes his head.

Jem tosses pebbles. The air smells of rain. Sweat is drying on their skins. The cold will get into them soon, the hunger will sharpen in them, and then they’ll have to go. Down by the trees the horse whinnies.

‘When I’m rich,’ Floss says, ‘I’ll own a horse, and I’ll feed it proper. And I’ll own a swimming pool.’

Jem scoffs; he can’t help himself. ‘People don’t own pools.’

‘I will when I’m rich. And it won’t have water in it.’

‘What then?’

‘Golden syrup.’

‘You’ll drown in that.’

‘I won’t. I’ll dive in, and there’ll be a big golden dent, and then a bubble with me in it, and then I’ll chew my way out.’

‘Brill,’ Jem says, all admiration.

Iris looks at Pond. ‘Are you an orphan, then?’

They all go quiet, listening. No one talks much to Pond. Iris tries to be nice, but Pond makes her timid, as he makes Floss jealous and Jem shy. Ever since summer Pond has been with them, but he isn’t one of them. A fourth is useful – good for games – but Pond is no one’s best friend. No one has him round. No one asks him about the things the grown-ups murmur amongst themselves, the things children aren’t meant to hear but do, the frightening things that are at the root of all their envy, shyness, and timidity.

‘I don’t know,’ is all he says, after all that waiting, and Floss huffs and stares away.

‘But Mr and Mrs Lazarus,’ Iris says, ‘they’re your parents now, aren’t they? So you’re not an orphan any more.’

‘He is so,’ Floss says. ‘He still is. Once you’re an orphan you stay one forever.’

‘Do you? But that’s cruel.’

Jem says, ‘Is it true you lived in a hole in the ground?’

‘It is,’ Iris says. ‘We saw him. I did see you,’ she says to Pond. ‘I thought you were a German ghost, but you weren’t. That was just one of Jem’s stories.’

‘I saw you too,’ Pond says.

Jem shivers in the fading light. The horse whickers again.

‘What was it like, then?’ Floss asks, ‘the hole?’

The way he looks at her is the way he looked when she dared him to jump. There is an eagerness in him. There’s a second when he looks as if he might dare to do something. In the end, though, he just shakes his head again.

‘It was my place,’ he says. ‘But I don’t need it any more.’

A spot of rain darkens the parapet. A woman hurries past with a parcel of Friday fish and chips. They all catch the smell of it. Jem thumps onto the bridge.

‘Race you for a chip,’ he says, and they do. They go racing through the rain.

*

‘It’s too much!’ Mary exclaims.

‘It wasn’t so dear. Noakes knows a man.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know what you meant.’

‘But Michael –’

‘It’s what we deserve.’

‘People will look.’

‘Let them. Go on, get in,’ Michael says, and Mary does.

She tries not to touch anything. She’s in the driver’s seat. The car rocks gently under her. The smell of its insides is strong. Leather, oil and cigarettes: money, men and potency. Outside, people dash through the tail-end of an autumn shower.

Mary puts a hand on the wheel. Her wheel. The wood is warm. It has the polish of good furniture. She closes her fingers on it.

Michael used to pick her up in his old man’s Hampshire, early on, when they were all still speaking. Once, too, when she was a girl, someone took her for a spin, her and half the kids in the row inside or hanging on. She has been in cars before. This is different.

She begins to look around. The roof is lined with padded satin. Near the back it has sagged, but she can patch that up. There are dials beside the wheel, and a clock set flush under glass. There is an ash-tray that shuts by itself, and a glove compartment that opens with a click and closes with even less than that, as if gloves are an indiscretion.

All these things, Mary thinks, fitted together so perfectly. Somewhere a man crafts each of them. It should cost the earth, to buy the work of so many men.

‘Budge up,’ Michael says, ‘I’ll catch my death out here.’

She can hear the enjoyment in his voice, but when she looks up his face is as it always is, at all times except when they make love: as handsome and unyielding as the face of a soldier carved in stone. He gets in clumsily as she moves over, stowing his stick between his knees.

They sit together, side by side. The last of the rain taps at the roof.

‘Do you like it?’ Michael asks.

‘It’s like being in a tent.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

Michael rolls down the window. Outside, two women are going past. One is young and sad; the other has thickened with age, but is still the prettier, with curls and rosy cheeks like those of a soapbox child. Neither of them looks at the car.

‘Oh shut up, duck,’ the rosy woman says. ‘Come along and have a drink and forget it.’

Michael watches them go. He rolls up the window again.

‘I made a mistake,’ he says.

‘Wait. Let’s just sit awhile.’

‘I can take it back.’

‘It feels so private,’ Mary says. ‘That’s what I mean. It feels like a place of our own.’

‘Do you like it, then?’

Mary reaches for his hand. ‘Take me somewhere,’ she says, and Michael frowns, but his eyes are smiling.

‘Where?’

‘I don’t care. Anywhere.’

‘What about the girls?’

‘Not yet,’ Mary says. ‘Just us.’

*

A trace of her is still on him – her fertile, musky dirtiness – when Cyril calls for him. Michael wears it out with him, under his clean shirt and shave. It gives him pleasure to know that no one else will know it’s there; all of them, and the whole city, being sunk in the stink of themselves.

They drive. Michael would walk, if he could – the nights won’t stay warm forever, and it does him good to stretch himself – but the choice isn’t his to make.

It’s not yet late, but it’s dark out. The street lamps have been off all week. The route is lit by their own car and by those few others that pass.

There are three of them this evening. The third is Cyril’s man, whose name (Cyril says it) is Oscar, and whose voice has the same laconic coldness Michael has heard before, but which he understands now as the echo of a northern country.

‘Here,’ Cyril says, and tosses Michael a bit of paper. Only by the proportions does he know it for a pound.

‘Spending money?’

‘Swan might be in. It’s time you met the old bugger. Buy a round if you get the chance. Go easy if we have a game – and don’t lose it to Swan if we do. He isn’t one for flattery.’

What do you care? Michael thinks. What business is it of yours how I play my cards? But he knows, though he cavils at the thought. Cyril is Alan Swan’s man, and Michael is Cyril’s . . . for now. A pound says he is. If Michael goes down well with Alan Swan, he’ll do them both some good. And they both want to move up in the world, don’t they? They all want to get on.

‘He’s not the man he used to be,’ Cyril says, speculatively.

They get out of the car. ‘You and all,’ Cyril says to Oscar, and to Michael, ‘I’ll want the change back after.’

They’re down on the basement steps when a drunk goes past above them. He’s singing to himself – some mucky music hall song – but Michael knows the voice. He glances back as Cyril knocks. It’s Wolfowitz, huddled in his ratty trench coat. The old man slows, waits, goes on.

Does Oscar look up, too? Michael can’t be sure. It’s gloomy in the basement yard until the club door opens, and by then Wolfowitz is gone.

‘In before the lock-in,’ Cyril winks, and they duck inside.

If Michael were to speak his mind, he’d say that Cyril’s gentlemen’s club isn’t worth the epithet. There are two girls, but neither cares much for the drudgery and both are always tired under their pancake and peroxide. There are a few card tables and no shortage of drink or men; and that’s that, as far as entertainment goes.

Cyril leads the way, past the snugs, into the warmth, where an old man sits with company at a stained baize table.

‘Alan,’ Cyril says, and the man peers up.

‘Cyril. I was just talking about you.’

‘This is Michael, Alan. The young fellow I was on about. Mickey, this is Alan Swan. You can shake his hand, he won’t bite.’